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  “Now, sweetie, do you need anything else?” Aunt Paulette was asking.

  “Nothing at the moment, darling Auntie. Thank you for—”

  “Stop saying thank you. It’s what family is for. And my baby sister Caroline would want me to make sure I was taking care of her baby girl.”

  They embraced again.

  “Call me later. Maybe we can barbecue out on the grill. Would you like that, Abby?”

  “Yeah!” the little girl chirped.

  Aunt Paulette kissed her on the top of the head, then headed back out herself.

  “Well, should we go check out the bedrooms?” Inga asked.

  “You and Abby go,” Jessie said. “I just want to sit in Mom’s kitchen for a while.”

  “All right.”

  The nanny scooped up a couple of small suitcases and headed up the stairs, Abby following close at her heels. Jessie could hear their footsteps across the floorboards above her, and her daughter’s voice announcing, “This is my room! I like the pretty wallpaper in here!”

  Jessie smiled. She felt close to her mother sitting here, at her old Formica-topped kitchen table. They’d been friends, not just mother and daughter. Jessie was glad that Mom hadn’t lived to see the troubles with Emil, or the spectacle of Jessie on the back of a roaring Harley riding down the main street of Sayer’s Brook. The cancer had come out of the blue, and Mom had been gone so quickly. Surely, Jessie thought now, her grief over her mother’s death had played as much a part as her heartbreak over Bryan’s rejection in the way she’d acted out by taking up with Emil.

  Bryan. Jessie realized that when they’d spoken of neighbors just now, no one had mentioned Bryan.

  She was well aware that in another house on their little cul-de-sac lived another of her old flames. Jessie had taken up with Bryan Pierce while both were juniors at the State University of New York—known as SUNY—in nearby Purchase. During spring break, she’d invited him up here to meet Mom—and her best friend across the street, Heather Wilson. Little did Jessie know that Heather decided from the moment she laid eyes on Bryan that she would snatch him away. Heather connived to see him, slipping him her number when Jessie wasn’t looking. Heather proved willing to give Bryan something Jessie had been withholding: herself.

  Maybe it was old-fashioned, but Jessie hadn’t wanted to have sex with Bryan right away. They’d been dating for eight months, and despite his fervent attempts, Bryan hadn’t been able to get Jessie to go all the way. But Heather did, the first night they met, clandestinely, and at that moment, Jessie lost Bryan. The old stories about a guy not respecting a girl who puts out too soon turned out to be false. Mom had predicted that Bryan would come back to Jessie now that he’d had Heather, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Just as had happened with Monica and Todd, now another woman had gotten ahold of Jessie’s man—and held on to him. In less than two years’ time, Heather had married Bryan; thankfully, they’d eloped, so there had been no wedding invitation in Jessie’s mailbox. And now that Heather’s parents had moved to Florida, they’d taken up residence in the family home, right down the street. Monica had told her that Heather and Bryan now had two little children, a girl and a boy, Piper and Ashton. “Maybe they can be playmates for Abby,” Monica had said.

  Jessie sighed. Did her sister ever stop to think how hearing about Bryan’s two little kids might make Jessie feel?

  Of course not. She’d done the same thing to Jessie as Heather had done.

  Jessie stood, scolding herself for feeling like a victim. Even if it was just a fleeting thought, she didn’t like feeling that way. That was the whole point of the book she was writing: you can’t be made a victim by anyone but yourself. All those soap operas between her and Heather and Monica and Bryan and Todd were years ago. Jessie had been just a kid. She’d never been serious with either boyfriend, even if her feelings had been strong and the rejection devastating. So she could either go through life feeling bitter and resentful—or not. She chose the latter. Jessie didn’t like what bitter and resentful did to her. It had made her reckless, and destructive, and unhealthy, and unattractive. So, with the help of a good therapist, she had made the choice to move past it. Both Todd and Bryan were corporate types anyway. She’d probably never have lasted with either of them even if Monica and Heather hadn’t intervened.

  Jessie had come to the sad conclusion that she had never really been in love. She’d thought she’d been, with both Todd and Bryan, and certainly when Emil showed up, she’d convinced herself that he was the real thing, her true soul mate. Jessie wasn’t proud of the fact that such a foul thing as Emil had been the first man she’d given herself to. Even Todd or Bryan would have been better choices. But in her acting-out phase, Jessie had been all too glad to let Emil be her first. She remembered the night she lost her virginity, in a boozy haze in the back of Emil’s van, to the sharp, shattering soundtrack of rap music. She’d thrown up afterward. The pain had been terrible, and she’d thought she could never do such a thing again. If that was what sex was like, why did so many women say they liked it? But Emil had gotten sex from her whenever he wanted it, even after Jessie got pregnant. Jessie was eternally thankful that part of her life was over.

  She was starting a new life. Maybe, somewhere in this new existence, she’d meet a man, a good man who could help her discover the true pleasures and intimacies of sex, things she’d never experienced. The only orgasms she’d ever achieved had been brought about by her own fingers, and she wasn’t even really sure about those. Jessie hoped someday she might meet a man and discover whether romance might still play a part in her life. She was only twenty-seven, after all. She still had plenty of time.

  But in fact what really motivated her at the moment wasn’t the desire to fall in love again. Instead, it was to raise Abby right, the way Mom had raised her, to love nature and to see the goodness in the world around her, and to instill the kind of self-respect and confidence that Jessie herself had forgotten during those few terrible years with Emil, and which she now held so firmly in her hands once again. She was excited to make a life for them here on the green, green lands of Hickory Dell, and to spend her days while Abby was in school writing her book up in her room, overlooking the great fir sentinels that stood protecting her and reassuring her that she was home.

  Stepping outside onto the back porch, Jessie inhaled the crisp, clean Connecticut air. Her nose twitched. Sometimes goldenrod made her sneeze. But even that she welcomed—it was far preferable to the exhaust of cars and the steam of subway trains. She glanced around the yard, at the maples and the white birches. A hawk soared above, making a long, sweeping arc through the shockingly blue sky. Her eyes followed the creature as it disappeared into the trees that surrounded the stone peak of John Manning’s house next door.

  Jessie gasped.

  In the topmost window of the house, someone stood looking out. It was impossible to know for sure, because the figure was cloaked in shadow, but it seemed as if the person in the window was staring directly down at her.

  THREE

  “I tell you, Arthur, it was her,” Gert Gorin was saying, eyes pressed against binoculars that were in turn pressed against the glass of the Gorins’ picture window. “It was the same girl who the cops once thought was involved in that drug-and-porn ring.”

  “Get away from the window, Gert,” her husband told her. “Somebody’s going to see you.”

  Gert looked over at her husband, the binoculars having left red rings around her bulging brown eyes. “She arrived in one of Todd Bennett’s company cars. I know it was a company car because it had New York plates and I’ve seen very similar ones pick him up before when he doesn’t drive his own car.”

  “You really should have pursued a career in the FBI, Gert,” Arthur said, sitting in his overstuffed armchair and reading the sports pages of the Daily News.

  “She had a child with her, a little girl.” Gert’s face was red and splotchy. She stood barely more than five feet, and was almost as wide
as she was tall. “That’s the baby she had with that guy Deetz. I don’t know if they ever got married.”

  “Isn’t that what you spray on to ward off mosquitoes ?”

  Gert made a face. “What?”

  “Deetz.”

  “You numbskull, that’s Deet. This guy’s name was Deetz. Emil Deetz. I remember because he killed a guy. Don’t you remember, Arthur? He slit a guy’s throat behind one of those dives over in Port Chester.”

  “All I remember is it’s past lunchtime, and I’m getting hungry. How about a bologna sandwich on rye?”

  Gert had replaced the binoculars to the window and was peering out through them again. “I wish I could see the old Clarkson house better. That damn new monstrosity the Bennetts built is in the way. God, is that an ugly thing. I can only make out the side of the old house, but I think I can see some movement upstairs. There’s another woman with the Clarkson girl and her kid—”

  Gert suddenly made a sound in her throat and pulled away from the window.

  “What is it?” her husband asked. “You see somebody naked?”

  “I just thought of something,” Gert said, returning her eyes to the binoculars. “Maybe she’s gone lesbo or something. You know, after all the problems she had with men. You know Bryan Pierce down the street dumped her, right? That was before she took up with Deetz. So maybe she’s gone gay all of a sudden. Because there were definitely two women that got out of the car and went up to the house. And the other one, the one who wasn’t the Clarkson girl, seemed kind of mannish to me.”

  “As opposed to your delicate femininity, I take it.”

  “Damn,” Gert said, adjusting the focus on the binoculars. “I think they’ve drawn the blinds.”

  FOUR

  “Mommy, there’s a little girl at the house down the street,” Piper Pierce announced as she ran into the kitchen, her pink shorts green with grass stains. “I saw her get out of the car. I want to go up and play with her. Maybe she has toys I don’t have.”

  Heather Pierce looked up from the table where she was planning the seating arrangement for tonight’s dinner party. “I doubt she has toys you don’t have,” she told her daughter. “That would be impossible. You have every toy ever produced.”

  “I do not!”

  Heather just rolled her eyes.

  “I want to go up there!”

  “No, you are not going up there,” she told her daughter.

  “But Mommy—”

  “Please don’t throw another tantrum. I don’t think I can take another. Just go outside and play with your brother.”

  The redheaded seven-year-old made a face in frustration, but did as she was told.

  “What house down the street?” Heather’s husband, Bryan, asked from the refrigerator, where he’d been pouring himself a glass of lemonade. Their housekeeper, a heavyset, gray-haired woman named Consuela, plopped a sprig of fresh mint into it for him as she walked past.

  “The Bennetts,” Heather told him, not looking up from her table diagram.

  “Who’s the kid?” Bryan asked, carrying his lemonade over to the table and sitting beside his wife. “They finally adopt since Monica seems to have turned out to be sterile?”

  Heather sighed and lifted her eyes to look at him. “Apparently Jessie’s moved back into her mother’s old house.”

  Bryan just stared at her.

  Heather looked back down at her diagram. “So it must be her kid who Piper saw.”

  “Wow, Jessie.” Bryan took a sip of his drink. “Well, what do you know? The prodigal has returned.” He looked over at the maid. “You’re right, Consuela. Everything does taste better with a bit of fresh mint.”

  “That is true, Mr. Bryan.”

  His eyes returned to Heather and he leaned in close. “Maybe I oughta try putting a sprig between your legs,” he whispered.

  “You’re a pig,” she replied.

  Bryan laughed, placing his lemonade on the table and sitting opposite his wife. “How does she look?” he asked.

  “How does who look?”

  “Jessie. Miss Jessica Clarkson, late of SUNY Purchase.”

  “I don’t know,” Heather said, still not looking back up at him. “I haven’t seen her.”

  Consuela set a glass of lemonade down beside Heather, topped with a bright green mint leaf.

  “Thank you,” Heather said. She looked up at Consuela, who gave her a sympathetic gaze. Heather took a sip of the lemonade, feeling as if she might burst into tears.

  Bryan got up and sauntered outside, carrying his glass, calling to his kids, who ran toward him. Heather watched through the window. She knew what Bryan was thinking. Jessie Clarkson. The girl from college he’d never gotten into bed. Heather knew Bryan kept track of things like that. For Bryan, it was all about the score—even after being a supposedly “happily married man” for the past six years. Heather knew he’d already had Betsy Blair from the office, and Michele Mariano, the girl who used to help Heather at catering events. Not to mention Clare Dzialo, the kids’ nineteen-year-old babysitter, with whom Bryan had convinced Heather to join for a three-way. Heather had only done so because she knew otherwise he’d have done the deed without her, and better that she know about Bryan’s trysts than not. She knew her husband well enough to know that his testosterone-fueled brain—located not in his head but in his cock—was already clicking with ideas on how to finally get his old flame Jessie into bed with him. Heather would have to do what she always did. Join in, or look the other way.

  God, she hated him.

  She watched Bryan playing horsie outside on the grass, Piper and Ashton crawling over him, their tinkly laughter floating into the house through the windows.

  Well, Heather thought, what was good for the gander was good for the goose. She flipped over her cell phone and tapped in a text message to John Manning.

  FIVE

  “A party? Oh, I don’t know, Aunt Paulette.”

  Jessie sat with her aunt on their back porch as Todd rode a lawn mower back and forth across the yard, the sharp fragrance of cut grass swirling through the air. In an area of the lawn already cut, Inga was painting the swing set a bright neon pink, as Abby danced around her, barely able to contain her excitement over her new toy.

  “Yes, a party,” Aunt Paulette replied. “I think it would be wonderful for everybody along Hickory Dell to come and see how wonderful you look and how good you’re doing.”

  Jessie admitted to herself that she might not mind that, either. She’d seen the looks Gert Gorin had thrown her as she and Abby had strolled down the street, or the glance Bryan Pierce had given her when she’d driven past in Monica’s car. Jessie hadn’t stopped to say hello to anyone. She’d been back for four days now, and still she hesitated to reintroduce herself to these people from her old life. They knew too much about her, and what had happened. She couldn’t just pull up alongside Bryan and lean out the car window and gush, “Bryan, old pal, old buddy! How’ve you been?” Too much had happened between them—and to Jessie—for their first interaction after all this time to be so casual.

  But a gathering . . . here . . . in her own home . . . on her own turf . . . with Abby . . . and Mom’s things all around them. . . .

  “We could invite old Mr. Thayer,” Aunt Paulette was saying, “and Bryan and Heather and their two little kids to play with Abby. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Oh, honey, maybe you don’t want to see Bryan. . . .”

  Jessie smiled. “It was a long time ago, Aunt Paulette.” She took a deep breath. “Maybe you’re right. Sure, let’s have a party. I’ve got to meet the neighbors again eventually. Might as well do it all at once.”

  “Wonderful.” The older woman clapped her hands together, a wide smile stretching across her leathery face, browned and roughened from years of being outdoors without any sunblock. “How about this Sunday afternoon? We’ll make a picnic out of it.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to invite the Gorins, too. We ca
n’t invite the whole street and leave them out.”

  Jessie smiled. “Well, maybe coming up here and seeing me and what we’ve done to the house will sate Mrs. Gorin’s curiosity. I’ve seen her looking over here with binoculars.”

  “You’re being kind when you call her curious. She’s plain nosy. Why, once when I saw her snooping around the mailboxes, I read her mind and saw that what she was considering was pilfering everyone’s mail, steaming it open, then returning it.”

  “That’s definitely not a good thing,” Jessie said, “but, honestly, Aunt Paulette, isn’t reading someone’s mind without their permission just as bad as reading their mail?”

  The older woman’s cheeks blushed red. “You’re right, sweetie. I try not to. But sometimes . . . it just comes. It just happens.”

  Jessie reached across the table and patted her aunt’s hand. For all Mom’s belief in fate and karma and the power of nature, she had never quite believed that her eccentric older sister had “the gift.” She used to say that Paulette had to believe she was good at something, because she’d tried going to teacher’s college, then nursing school, then cosmetology classes—and each time, she’d been unable to graduate. It wasn’t that Aunt Paulette was unintelligent—she was, in fact, quite bright—but she had little patience for protocols and discipline and rules and deadlines. Good thing that her own parents had left her enough money that she’d never really had to work.

  For most of the last twenty years, Aunt Paulette had read tarot cards and performed psychic readings for forty-five dollars an hour. She kept an ad running in a local “New Age” journal, which meant that, periodically, a car full of housewives, or college students, would show up on Hickory Dell, and they’d all traipse up to the cottage of “Madame Paulette Drew” to learn from the lady with the bright red lipstick if they were about to come into some money or meet any tall, dark, and handsome strangers. Mom dismissed it as “all in good fun”—a line that Aunt Paulette had to officially maintain herself. She billed her readings as “entertainment,” since actual “fortune-telling” was illegal in Connecticut. But there was no doubt, to Mom or to Jessie, that she honestly believed her gift was real.