Читать книгу A Vow to Keep - Cara Colter - Страница 9

THE ringing of the phone was shrill and incessant. Rick Chase startled awake, glanced at his bedside clock. Red digits flashed 4:00 a.m.

No good ever came from a phone ringing in the darkest hours of the night.

He picked up the receiver, aware he was braced for the worst, and hoping for a drunk who had dialed the wrong number.

“Hello?”

“Uncle Rick?”

The last vestiges of sleep were gone. He sat up in bed, the blankets falling away from his naked chest. He fumbled for the light on his night table, as if being able to see would help him hear better.

“Bobbi?”

“Sorry to wake you. I wanted to talk to you before I went to class.”

Class? At four in the morning? And then he remembered. His goddaughter was taking her first year of university in Ontario, two thousand miles—and a three-hour time difference—from Calgary.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” A tremble in her voice said maybe she wasn’t.

“What’s up, Bo-Bo?” He used her childhood nickname by instinct, knowing it would make her feel safe and listened to, but then he was sorry he had, because it reminded him of her on her tricycle, pigtails flying, days gone that were never coming back. Happy days, uncomplicated.

“I’m worried about my mom,” she wailed.

A fist closed around his heart. He was amazed that his voice sounded as calm as it did when he said, “What about your mom? What about Linda?”

“Did you know she sold our house?”

He felt a little ripple of shock. Linda had sold the house? And not gone through his real estate company? His and her late husband’s company? It was half her company, and she had not used it?

“I didn’t know that, no.”

“She bought a shack, Uncle Rick, a falling down shack in Bow Water. She e-mailed me a picture of it.” She made a gagging noise, Bo-Bo still there, hiding within that oh-so-sophisticated college girl after all.

Bobbi had been raised in the lap of luxury, in a seven thousand square foot Riverdale manor house that backed onto the Elbow River. What she considered a shack and what most people considered a shack were probably two very different things. Still, Bow Water could be a rough neighborhood. Why would Linda, of all people, buy there?

“She’s moved in already,” Bobbi said, her voice strained with injury. “She didn’t even give me a chance to say goodbye to our old house, to pack a few of my own things. She sold the car, too.”

“The Mercedes?” Linda couldn’t be having financial problems. It was impossible. The company was in excellent health.

“Oh, she still has a Mercedes, but you’ll have to see it to believe it.” A dramatic sigh, and then, “Uncle Rick, she cut her hair. I think my mom is losing her mind.”

He wondered, troubled, if it was a genuine possibility. Linda Starr had survived a terrible tragedy in the loss of her husband thirteen months ago, now her only child was away at school. Could she be falling apart?

No, not Linda, always refined, always composed, always classy. Even in the middle of chaos, she had retained that almost regal refinement, as if she was untouchable, unmovable, a rock that the stormy sea washed around. Linda Starr seemed like the least likely person to be losing her mind.

“What is it you want me to do, Bobbi?”

“Go check on her!” This was said with a certain feminine impatience, as if he was supposed to know what to do.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll check on her, before work.”

From the heavy sigh, a little more was expected of him.

“You need to ask her to come back to work. She’s becoming reclusive and weird.”

He heard the reproach in her voice and knew it was at least partly deserved. “I’ve tried to talk to your mother, Bobbi. She doesn’t want to talk to me.” Let alone work with me. Besides, it had been at least fifteen years since Linda’d had any active involvement in the company.

“Give me a break! You could sell snake oil to a rattlesnake farmer, and you can’t talk my mother into getting her life back?”

He wanted to deflect the accusation by keeping it light. “Is there such a thing as a rattlesnake farmer?” he asked.

Bobbi was not about to be sidetracked. “You abandoned her after Daddy died. Everybody did.”

He wanted to say, She wanted to be abandoned, to defend himself, but suddenly his position seemed indefensible.

“And she was so good to you after you went through your divorce from Kathy. Is that seven years ago? Already?”

“Yes.”

Another memory, as tender as that of Bobbi on her trike, of her mother taking both his hands in the warmth of hers, looking into his eyes, saying, It will be all right, Rick. Maybe not today, but someday.

She had been right, too. When the pain, the humiliation of failure, had subsided, he had realized his divorce had freed him to do all the things he loved. He had bought a motorcycle first, and then, with his appetite for solitary adventures whetted, he had taken up traveling. Not the posh, resort kind of traveling his ex-wife would have enjoyed, but true exploring of a world so rich in diversity and culture he sometimes wondered if he would have time to discover and experience all the things he wanted to.

Still, he knew his contentment with his own lifestyle, combined with the wariness created by his divorce, had made him a solitary soul. Maybe, somewhere in the past seven years, he had even become a selfish, self-centered man.

What other excuse did he have for not being there for a friend? Though, when he thought of Linda, he thought their relationship might be a little more complicated than friendship.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly to her daughter.

“Her whole life was about me, and now I’m gone, too. Uncle Rick, she needs a purpose. Promise me you’ll find something at Star Chasers for her to do.”

A gauntlet laid down. It would be foolish to pick it up. What did he know about helping a woman whose dignity had been shredded and whose heart had been broken? On the other hand, he knew all about promises. Vows. He didn’t want to be that responsible for another human being’s happiness, ever again.

“She needs to be around people,” her daughter said with the absolute authority of one young enough to still believe she knew everything. “She needs to have something to do. She loves old houses. She still has pictures of some of the early ones that you and her and Dad restored together. That interest could be channeled constructively, before she sells off anything else.”

He heard himself saying, cautiously, “I can’t make your mother do anything she doesn’t want to do, Bobbi.”

“Promise me you’ll try.”

Maybe it was the hour of the morning that weakened him, or maybe it was the pleading in that tender young voice.

“Okay. I promise.”

“Thank you, Uncle Rick!” There was hope in her voice, as if she truly believed he could fix something so desperately fragile. But he already felt regret. He knew he shouldn’t get involved in this. Helping someone who was heart weary was like treading on sacred ground.

Still, he’d offer Linda a job, she’d say no and his duty would be done.

But the promise he’d just made implied more than a lackluster effort. That was the problem with promises. They required way more of a man than he was prepared to give.

Dumb to get involved, Rick thought, staring at the phone after he’d hung up, but what if Linda did need something? She would be too proud—and too angry—to ever ask him.

Anger he deserved, he reminded himself, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes. Anger he deserved because he had kept her husband Blair’s secrets from her.

And he kept one still.

What had he just let himself in for? He got out of bed, went to the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. One thing he knew, he was not going to face Linda Starr without a plan.