a stiff drink. “If you ask me, she was just testing, to see how far she could go. And I have to confess I’m getting just as tired of it as you are.” Handing her the drink, he smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a father to her, which isn’t an excuse—only an apology.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” Carolyn replied. She held the drink up in a silent toast, but as Phillip drank from his glass, she put her own back on the bar. “Pregnant ladies shouldn’t drink.” Then, feeling the built-up strain of the evening, she lowered herself tiredly into one of the wing chairs. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.
Phillip looked at her quizzically, but said nothing.
“Come on,” Carolyn pressed. “Your mother said something to you that you didn’t want Tracy to hear. What was it?”
Phillip said nothing, but wandered over to the fireplace, where he stood leaning against the mantel, staring into his glass. Finally, instead of answering her question, he asked one of his own. “You don’t think I should go ahead with the mill project, either. Is it just because of the way it used to operate, or is it something else?”
Carolyn frowned, wondering what, exactly, he was getting at. And then, slowly, the pieces began falling together in her mind. But what it added up to made no sense. It was as if Conrad Sturgess had suddenly risen from his chair in the mausoleum, and come back into the house with all his superstitions, and ramblings of evil in the mill. “It’s the history,” she said at last. “My great-great-grandfather was driven to suicide because of the mill. That my family blamed old Samuel Pruett is something you know, Phillip. It’s been a sore spot in my family for generations.”
“And yet you married me,” Phillip pointed out.
“I love you,” Carolyn replied.
Phillip nodded perfunctorily, and Carolyn had the distinct feeling that he hadn’t really heard her, that his mind was on something else. “Was your family afraid of the mill?” she finally heard him ask.
Carolyn hesitated. Again, more pieces fell into place. “There were stories,” she said, almost reluctantly.
“What kind of stories?”
“There was a story that several children disappeared from the mill. And right after that, your family closed it.”
“Disappeared?” Phillip asked, his eyes reflecting a genuine puzzlement that told Carolyn he’d never before heard the story.
“That’s what I was told. One day some of the children went to work, and didn’t come home again. The story the mill put out was that they’d run away. And I suppose it was plausible, given the working conditions. But a lot of people in Westover didn’t believe it. My great-grandparents certainly didn’t.”
Phillip’s forehead furrowed into a deep frown, and he refilled his glass. “What did they think happened?”
“They thought the children had died in the mill, and that the Sturgesses covered it up.” She hesitated, then went on. “One of the missing children was a member of my family.”
Phillip was silent for a moment. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that story before?”
“There didn’t seem any point,” Carolyn replied. “It all happened so long ago, and I’ve never been quite sure whether to believe it or not.” She smiled ruefully. “Well, to be perfectly honest, I was more than ready to believe it until I met you. Then I decided no one as nice as you could have sprung from a family that would have done something as awful as that, so I decided that the tales my grandmother told me must have been exaggerated. Which they probably were,” she added, attempting a lightness she wasn’t quite feeling. “You know how old family stories go.”
“Don’t I just,” Phillip agreed, smiling thinly. “So now you don’t believe the story?”
Carolyn shrugged. “I don’t know that I ever believed it, truly. And I don’t know that I disbelieve it now. It’s just there, that’s all. And whether I believe it or not, I’ll never be comfortable about that mill. It gives me the willies, and it doesn’t matter what you do to it, it always will.”
Phillip sighed heavily. “Well, if what Mother said is true, it gave her considerably more than the willies this afternoon.” Then, as Carolyn listened in silence, he repeated what Abigail had told him at the hospital. When he was finished, she picked up her glass from the bar, took a large sip, then firmly replaced it. “She really said it was the fear that brought on the heart attack,