Chapter 3
3
Present Day
“It’s a bachelorette party, in reverse!” Audra crowed as she joined Madison, Olivia, Kendall and Alexis in the main parlor of Coralee Bettencourt’s old house.
They’d all showered and exchanged their bridal garb for shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops, and Madison, for one, felt as light as if she’d just lost one hundred eighty pounds—which she had, actually, having shed Jeffrey.
Never mind his mother.
Both of them had been blowing up Madison’s cell phone in intermittent bursts of outrage since the cake incident, and she’d finally blocked them.
After stripping off her gown, veil, petticoats and high heels, then taking two aspirin and washing them down with strong coffee.
Now that she safe in the company of her very best friends, the headache was subsiding, and so were the effects of the whiskey she’d swilled at the Hard Luck Saloon. She felt semihuman—and ravenously hungry.
She’d been back at Bettencourt Hall for a full week already, but she hadn’t bothered to stock the refrigerator or the pantry. She’d been too busy getting ready for a wedding that, she knew now, should never have happened in the first place.
For one thing, she wasn’t sure she’d ever really loved Jeffrey, or even liked him, in retrospect. More likely, she’d wanted to love him, and made up her mind that she did. She’d been hell-bent on having the family she wanted so desperately before her biological clock ran down.
Well, she’d been a shortsighted idiot, believing marriage to the first reasonable candidate was the solution to her dilemma. This was the twenty-first century, after all, and women were no longer required to take a husband just because they wanted babies.
They could adopt or use donor sperm.
Although she still needed to process a lot of emotional stuff where her two ill-fated weddings were concerned, she had made a decision, one she hadn’t shared with her ponytail posse, as Jeffrey had once described them.
She wanted to have the full experience of pregnancy, at least once, and now, unless a miracle happened, that would mean exploring her fertility options.
“Time to send out for pizza,” Kendall chimed in, bringing Madison’s full attention back to the present moment.
Kendall’s shoulder-length auburn hair, just washed, hung in damp tendrils around her earnest, makeup-free face.
An actress in a popular, long-running soap opera, she lived in New York City and had mastered the art of ordering in long before DoorDash and Uber Eats came on the scene.
The others agreed to the plan, and Kendall got out her phone and started scrolling for local eateries that delivered.
Once their late lunch/early dinner had been arranged, Madison plunked down in a tattered floral chintz armchair and flung both legs over one side.
The others took seats on couches and settees and, in Audra’s case, cross-legged on the floor.
Seeing her friend sitting that way sparked a memory in Madison’s weary and still slightly achy head.
Bliss. The childhood friend who, by now, Madison almost believed had been imaginary, just as her grandmother claimed, back in the day.
The scruffy, scrappy little girl had often sat cross-legged in the grass, on the picnic blanket Madison had swiped from a cabinet in the storage room, even on top of Charles C. Bettencourt III’s box-shaped headstone.
Madison had met her often in the little cemetery hidden away in a stand of trees well behind the house; they’d had picnics—Bliss was always hungry—and talked about all sorts of things.
For all their differences, they’d only argued once, and that had been pretty one-sided, since Bliss did most of the talking. Madison, always the peacemaker, had tried to reason with her friend—at that time, her only friend—but the other girl hadn’t let her get a word in edgewise.
She’d stormed off into the woods, Bliss had, and Madison had feared she’d never see her friend again. She’d known, from things Bliss had told her, that her family was transient.
And, of course, desperately poor.
That much had been obvious, even to a sheltered eight-year-old living with her wealthy and constantly busy grandmother.
One day, when the leaves of the oaks, maples and birch trees were well into their transformation from green to yellow to orange to crimson, Madison had arrived at their meeting place with a bag of homemade cookies and a thermos full of ice-cold milk, only to find a note—a single word, actually—scribbled on the inside cover of a matchbook.
Goodbye , Bliss had written in small, tidy block letters.
That was all. Just goodbye .
There had been a bracelet made of braided thread tucked in behind the last remaining match—a friendship bracelet.
Where had she put that humble but profound gift, all those years ago? Madison wondered now.
Had she thrown it away?
She’d shown it to Coralee once, hoping it would serve as proof that Bliss Morgan was a living, breathing human being, not a mere figment of a lonely child’s rather wild imagination. But Coralee had merely shaken her head and tut-tutted and told Madison to never mind, she’d make lots of new friends when she went back to school in Silver Hills the following week.
“Hey!” Fingers with long metallic nails snapped in front of Madison’s nose. “Kendall to Mads, come in please.”
Madison blinked, returned to the here and now with a jolt.
“I hope you weren’t wasting perfectly good brain cells thinking about that scumbag, Jeffrey Sterne,” said Kendall, tucking her phone into the hip pocket of her cotton shorts.
“Actually, I wasn’t,” replied Madison, sitting up straight now, with her legs in front of her, resting on one of Coralee’s many wildly valuable Turkish rugs; they were all over the house, upstairs and down.
“Maybe she was thinking about that hot bartender,” Alexis put in. She’d wound her dark brown hair into a knot at the top of her head, secured by two lacquered sticks. “I know I have been.” She paused, looked from face to face. “Do you think a guy like that could handle being married to a pediatrician?” she asked.
“I think a guy like that could handle anything ,” Olivia commented dryly, and with a twinkle. She’d exchanged her gorgeous yellow bridesmaid’s gown for casual clothes, like the others, and replaced the elegant turban she’d worn to the wedding with a bright paisley-print scarf.
Olivia, happily married and a very popular mommy blogger, was recovering from yet another round of chemo, having been diagnosed with breast cancer a year before. Her naturally curly near-black hair was growing back, but slowly—too slowly for Olivia’s purposes.
Hence her impressive collection of scarves and turbans.
For whatever reason, she disdained wigs.
“What was it they used to say, way back when flappers were flapping?” added Audra, shaking one hand as if to cool off burning fingertips. “Hubba hubba!”
Madison looked at her friends, each one in turn, and thought, for the millionth time since she’d first met them in her freshman year of college, just how damn lucky she’d been to find them.
They were brilliant women, with good hearts and strong minds.
She cherished them.
“You’re all crazy,” she said, with a laugh. “I’m a two-time loser, remember? First Tom, now Jeffrey. The last thing I’m going to be looking for is another guy to mess up my life. And do any of you realize how much money I spent on this wedding?”
“You’re a Bettencourt,” Kendall said, quite unnecessarily, “and, besides that, you and Audra own a design company, with an app and everything. You could afford a hundred weddings just like that one.”
“The Bettencourt fortune belongs to my grandmother,” Madison reminded her friend. “Not me.”
“Like you won’t inherit everything,” Alexis commented, spreading her arms wide to indicate their lush if somewhat shabby surroundings. The grandfather clock in the entryway ticked ponderously. “This house must be worth a couple of million, all by itself. And aren’t you the only heir?”
She was the only heir, with Coralee’s one son, Madison’s father, dead all these years. But that didn’t mean Madison would get the house, or a cent of the family money; her grandmother believed in making one’s own way in the world. For all she knew, Coralee might leave her impressive estate to charity.
“I would never sell this house,” Madison said, very quietly.
“Why not?” Olivia asked practically. “Once Coralee passes, you won’t have any reason to come back here.”
True enough, Madison thought. Her condo and the offices she and Audra shared were on the other side of the country, in sunny Florida. Boca Raton, in fact, one of her favorite cities.
She would definitely have to go back there, if only to make sure Jeffrey moved out of her condo, where he’d been living for the last six months, without doing any damage. Soon.
She’d never known him to be spiteful, but his mother was the devil’s favorite sister, and Madison didn’t trust that woman not to demolish the place single-handedly at the first opportunity. Jeffrey being Jeffrey, it was a pretty good bet that Yolanda had a card for the main gate and a key to the front door.
Madison made a mental note to check the security cameras.
“Coralee isn’t doing well,” she said, returning yet again to the moment at hand. Madison had visited her grandmother at the Silver Hills Assisted Living Center every day since her arrival in town, including that one, before donning her wedding gown, hoping Coralee might have rallied enough to attend the ceremony.
Instead, she’d gazed, befuddled, at Madison’s face, clearly trying to place her, and there was no more denying the fact that Coralee, her only living blood relation, was truly fading away. It fractured her heart.
Coralee would never live to see her great-grandchildren—if there ever were any—and the dementia was definitely getting worse.
For all that, it was probably for the best that her grandmother hadn’t been present when the wedding reception went sideways.
“So I’m planning to stick around for a while,” Madison went on, realizing she’d dropped the conversational ball again. She and Audra had already agreed that they could conduct any necessary meetings either over the phone or via Zoom.
“How long is a while?” Alexis wanted to know, kicking off her flip-flops and wiggling her toes. “A few weeks? A month?”
Alexis wasn’t nosy, really, but she was the unofficial social secretary for the group. She arranged their group chats, meet-ups and informal retreats. Since they lived in separate states, except for Audra and Madison, their get-togethers required flurries of text messages and emails, and the juggling of schedules.
Madison grinned at her very efficient friend. “I’ll let you know,” she promised.
After making a communal agreement not to discuss the failed wedding, Jeffrey, or his narcissistic mother, the band of sisters took turns catching the others up on recent events in their lives. Their time together was limited; the four bridesmaids were all leaving for the airport in Kalispell first thing in the morning.
The pizza arrived, and was promptly reduced to crumbs, since all of them were starving—except, that is, for Olivia, whose appetite was nearly nonexistent.
She did manage to eat half a slice, at all of their urging, but none of them pressured her. After all, she was recovering from breast cancer, and they knew she could barely tolerate food.
Olivia’s health was a worry to them all, but they respected the rules she’d set early on, and kept their fears for her to themselves.
Unless, of course, she wasn’t around to hear them speculate and fret, which they did, and frequently.
Olivia, for her part, swore she was on the mend, but her husband, Dave, had confided, during her most recent hospitalization, that he was afraid she was dying.
He’d found letters she’d written to him and to their children, fat envelopes sealed with colorful wax, each one marked with its recipient’s name and the date it was to be opened. He suspected she’d been making farewell videos, too, when privacy allowed.
Watching her now, sitting gracefully on the settee with her hands folded in her lap, Madison felt a pang of sorrow at the prospect of a world without Olivia Denning in it.
Olivia caught her looking, smiled wanly and made a face. Mouthed the words, Stop it. Right now.
The evening passed, full of chatter and laughter and, inevitably, tears.
Finally, almost everyone retired to their assigned guest rooms, worn out and grumbling about how early they would have to get up the next morning.
Madison and Audra stayed behind, gathering empty pizza boxes, crumpled napkins and soda cans and carrying it all to the kitchen to be disposed of in the appropriate bins.
They were washing the breakfast dishes, left behind in the rush to get things rolling that morning, when Audra nudged Madison lightly with one elbow and asked, “How are you, Mads? Really, I mean. I know you decided not to marry Jeffrey, and I’m behind you one hundred percent, but I also know you must be disappointed. Talk to me.”
Madison sighed, up to her elbows in hot, soapy dishwater. “I am disappointed,” she admitted. “Mostly with myself. Audra, I think I knew all along that I shouldn’t marry Jeffrey, and yet I did it anyway. I mean, I almost did it anyway.” She drew in a weary breath, huffed it out. “What was I thinking?”
Audra, drying a plate with one of the many embroidered dish towels Coralee had collected over the years, lifted one eyebrow and grinned a little. She was a stunning blue-eyed blonde, with chin-length hair, a perfect nose and the best bone structure Madison had ever seen, bar none.
She was also a brainiac, at least in business. When it came to romance, her track record wasn’t a whole lot better than Madison’s. She, too, had been married and divorced, driven away by her twin stepdaughters, who had hated her on sight.
Since then, Audra had dated occasionally, though she’d kept the men she met at arm’s length and fled if things started to become serious. She’d loved her husband deeply, even though he’d been almost twenty years her senior, and she’d been devastated when he’d bought into his daughters’ smear campaign.
“What were you thinking,” she murmured thoughtfully. “I must confess, Madison Bettencourt, that I haven’t the faintest idea. From the first, we, your home girls, thought Jeffrey was a lightweight, and our impression didn’t improve after we met his mother at that lovely dinner party you threw last weekend. Talk about enmeshment. Freud would have been fascinated.”
Madison winced. “Well, that was direct,” she said.
“I’m nothing if not direct,” Audra replied, drying another plate. Looking thoughtful. “Truth is, I’m kind of worried about you. You’re not a stupid woman, but you must have overlooked a thousand red flags on your way to today, and I’m wondering why.”
“You know why,” Madison said. “I want children, and I’m running out of time. Jeffrey agreed to start a family right away.”
“Was that before or after he tried to get you to open joint bank accounts?” Audra asked. “And put his name on the deed to your condo?”
Madison flushed, a little angry, but mainly embarrassed. “I shot down both ideas right away, remember?”
“You should have shot Jeffrey down, figuratively speaking, of course.”
Madison was cornered, and she didn’t like it. She also knew she didn’t have the proverbial leg to stand on.
She’d been stupid, recklessly ignored a bunch of warning signs—all because she wanted so much to be part of a family, with children of her own.
Audra was absolutely right. About everything.
“He doesn’t have much of a personality,” she went on. “And the mama’s boy thing—”
Madison drew a deep, calming breath, and let it out slowly before answering, “I thought he’d get over that, once we were married.”
Audra looked unconvinced, and the plate she’d just dried clattered a little as she placed it in the cupboard. “Woman,” she said, “you need to watch about a hundred episodes of Dr. Phil and come to the realization that there are some real wackos in this world. Jeffrey and his crazy mama being exhibits one and two.”
“You’ve made your point,” Madison said, shoulders sloping slightly. “It’s over now. Jeffrey and I are history.”
Audra glanced at Madison’s left hand, which was dripping soapsuds. “That must be why you’re still wearing the rings,” she reasoned.
Madison stiffened. With all that had been going on, she’d completely forgotten about the spectacular diamonds glittering on her ring finger, stretching almost to her knuckle.
Hastily, she pulled them off, shoved them into the pocket of her jeans shorts. She was blushing again, glad she’d never told Audra, or any of the others, that she’d bought the rings herself, with Jeffrey promising to pay her back out of his end-of-the-year bonus.
Audra smiled gently, patted Madison lightly on the shoulder. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll get off your back now. I just wanted to make sure you were really all right with the way things turned out, that’s all.”
“I know,” Madison replied, choking up a little.
Yes, she was on the verge of tears, but it wasn’t because the wedding was off.
It was because Coralee was losing ground every day.
Because Olivia was so sick.
And because she might never hold a child of her own in her arms.
“You’re exhausted,” Audra said. “Go to bed, Mads. I’ll finish up here.”
“The housekeeper will be in tomorrow,” Madison said, though she was reluctant to leave a mess for Estelle to clean up. The elderly woman had worked for Coralee for nearly forty years, and she was family.
For the past two months, with Coralee confined to the care facility in Silver Hills, Estelle had cut back to one day a week, when she dusted, vacuumed, brought in any packages or mail, and made sure things were okay in the old house.
“Estelle? I thought she was retiring,” Audra said, still busy with the dish towel.
“She is,” Madison answered, glad that the subject had changed, however brief the respite was likely to be. “Her daughter Connie will be taking over the job soon, such as it is.”
They were both silent for a while, finishing their tasks.
Finally, Audra hung the dish towel up to dry, and Madison wiped out the sink, then washed her hands and applied lotion.
“I think it might be good for you to stay here in Painted Pony Creek,” Audra said, starting toward the back stairway leading to the second floor.
Madison followed. It was early, but she was tired to the bone.
It had been a long and very crazy day.
“I have to make sure Coralee’s being taken care of,” Madison replied, feeling sad. If—when—her grandmother passed away, she would have no family left.
Good friends, yes. But no blood relations. No one who shared her DNA.
All the more reason to start exploring her options for conceiving a child as soon as she reasonably could.
She needed time to shift emotional gears from the Jeffrey debacle, however, and Coralee’s condition would certainly be a factor, too.
Since there were no fertility clinics nearby, she’d have to do some research, find a doctor she trusted, and probably have various medical and psychological tests before she even qualified for treatment.
She’d do what she could to get the process started, then turn her attention to visiting Coralee, having any necessary repairs done to the house, and working remotely with Audra.
Fortunately, their company basically took care of itself, with some help from the technical staff, and recently a major corporation had made a breathtaking offer to buy the business. She and Audra were seriously considering accepting it.
Audra wanted to travel, and Madison, well, she’d wanted a loving partner.
So much for that.
For the time being, they parted ways, both of them yawning, Audra heading for the guest room she’d chosen, Madison slipping into her childhood quarters.
The space hadn’t changed much, either in the years she was away at boarding school and college or since her last visit, eight weeks ago, when Coralee had been hospitalized for several days prior to being transferred to the place in Silver Hills.
The wallpaper, featuring tiny pink roses on a cream-colored background, was fading, but still pretty. The cushions on the window seat were fluffy and comfortable, and the beige carpet was clean, if outdated.
Estelle, bless her, had kept this room up, just as she had the rest of the house.
In a way, Bettencourt Hall—silly, pretentious name—had been Estelle’s home, too. She’d spent far more time here than in her cottage in town, cooking, cleaning, keeping Coralee company.
Suddenly, Madison’s eyes burned.
She crossed the large room to the wall of bookshelves, ran her hand across the spines of story after wonderful story.
For her, those books—everything from Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Dorothy Dunnett’s marvelous, multivolume Lymond Chronicles and monumental series, The House of Niccolò— had been magical portals leading from an ordinary and rather lonely world into fascinating adventures of all kinds.
Feeling nostalgic, she reached for The Hobbit , opened it, and flipped through the yellowed, dog-eared pages, smiling as she remembered her many visits to Middle Earth.
She replaced the beloved novel, took down another of her childhood favorites— Through the Looking Glass.
And there it was, serving as a bookmark.
Bliss’s friendship bracelet, the one she’d left behind as a farewell gift, all those years ago.
The thing was grubby and frayed, and thinner than Madison remembered, and its colors had faded to mere shadows of the rich hues they’d been the day she’d found it, along with Bliss’s abrupt goodbye note, out in the cemetery.
Madison rubbed the threads between the fingertips of her left hand, holding the book in the other, and remembered.
Bliss. Bliss Morgan, age eight.
Where was she now?
Was she even alive?
Something tightened in Madison’s recently rebroken heart, remembering her lost friend.
Here was the proof. Bliss had been a real person, not a fantasy figure, as Coralee had claimed.
But what had happened to her? Had her parents simply skipped town with her, moved on to squat in some other empty camper in some other place?
Had she been abducted by a stranger, or run away on her own?
Madison slid the bracelet carefully onto her right wrist and made up her mind to find out what had become of Bliss Morgan, no matter what it took.
Damn it, someone had to care.