Copper Lake Confidential - By Marilyn Pappano Page 0,71
for loving her. Hell, she’d been a dysfunctional mother locked up in a psych hospital when Anne met her. No one would have blamed her if she’d gone screaming the other way.
Or Stephen.
Back in the library, they ran out of small boxes long before they ran out of books. Hands on her hips, Macy surveyed the room. “The rooms are starting to sound empty.” The high ceilings gave a faint echo back at her.
“Besides the furniture, the lamps and art and the rest of these books, what’s left downstairs?” Brent asked.
“The kitchen. That’ll take an afternoon. The china cabinets in the dining room. A few things in the powder room and laundry room.” She swallowed. “Mark’s office.”
“Have you been in there yet?”
“Once. For a minute.”
Sympathy flashed through her brother’s brown eyes. “Why don’t you let me start that room? You girls can go shopping or cook dinner or jump in the pool.”
“Well...” Part of her wanted to say sure, jump right in. But part of her felt as if she should do the work. Next to Mark’s closet, the office was his most personal space in the house. He’d kept photographs there, souvenirs, all his important papers. The room smelled of him; his presence remained strong.
“I’ll just sort through things, pack it in boxes. Then when you and Clary settle, when you’ve got plenty of time and space, you can go through it yourself.”
“Okay.” She hoped she hadn’t given in too easily, but truth was, she would be clearing out Mark’s other most personal space: his closet. The clothes he wore. The jewelry that had passed down from his father and grandfathers. The suits he’d worn to church, the tuxedo he’d married her in. Wasn’t that up close and personal enough? “I’ll start in our bedroom.”
“If you’re both going to keep working,” Anne said, “tell me what you want for dinner. I want to cook in that kitchen at least once.”
Macy left them to figure that out and began carrying wardrobe boxes upstairs. She planned to donate most of her clothing to Right Track. Some of the more formal clothes wouldn’t be of much use, though maybe they could sell them online. She would offer them first dibs on Mark’s clothes, as well.
“Clary,” she called when she returned downstairs for a second load of boxes.
“We’re in here.” She and Scooter were sprawled on one of Miss Willa’s treasures, a petit-point sofa that predated the Great War, looking at a book Clary had brought with her from Charleston.
“AnAnne’s going to the store, so why don’t you and Scooter come upstairs with me while she’s gone?” There was no telling what they could get into given free run of the house with only two adults inside.
“Okay, Mama.” A smile wreathing her face as if it were the best idea in ages, Clary closed the book and tucked it in the crook of her arm, then spoke to Scooter as if he’d always been hers to command. “Come, Scooter. Upstairs.”
In the master bedroom she sat on the bed and chattered, mostly to the dog, while Macy taped together a half dozen tall cartons and inserted the metal rods for hanging clothes. She didn’t really tune in until Clary spoke her name. “What, sweetie?” she asked absently.
“Whose house is this?”
“It’s ours.”
“But we don’t live here.”
“No.”
“And you’re taking everything out. Why?”
“Because we’re going to find a new house.”
“Why don’t we just stay at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s like we been?”
Macy checked the pockets of a suit coat on the rack, then transferred it to the carton. “Because grown-up mamas don’t usually live with their own mamas and daddies.”
“Can we get a house by Scooter’s?”
Five days ago, two days ago, it had been easier to give an unconditional no to that question. Now... Was Stephen right? Was it only the Howard family that she hated about Copper Lake? It wasn’t a bad town. She knew and respected a lot of people here. Of course, there were plenty she didn’t like—Louise and her cronies came to mind—but that would be true anywhere. She liked the idea of Clary going to school with kids whose families she knew. The weather couldn’t be better nine months out of the year, and she was a Southern girl. She knew how to stay cool those other three months.
The downside to Copper Lake: people knew everything about her.
The upside, Stephen would say, was that people knew everything. There’d be no worrying about when or how to tell her secrets. And she knew small