Page 23 of Dreams of Falling
He paused, his hand on the door handle. “I don’t want to keep you from your supper.”
I tugged on his arm, feeling like a child, but desperate to get him to tell me more. “Why would Daddy want to talk with you about it?”
His eyebrows knitted together over his nose. “Have you followed anything that’s happened here since you left?”
For the first time in nine years, I felt embarrassed about my abrupt departure and the complete severing of all my ties. My actions had been justified—I was still sure of that. But all the time I’d been away, I’d assumed that everything had remained the same, that people and beliefs hadn’t changed. Which was stupid, because I hadn’t stayed the same. I felt a little of my old resolve not to look back shift and redistribute itself, like sand in an outgoing tide. That was another thing I’d never admit to Bennett.
“No,” I said, focusing my gaze on the old tree by the river and thinking of the ribbons I still had bundled in my pocket.
He paused for a minute, as if expecting me to tell him I was joking. After a brief shake of his head, he said, “I own a small firm in Columbia that focuses on repurposing older commercial and residential buildings for current use. A couple of other engineers and I lay out all the new mechanics in ways that won’t destroy the integrity of an older building, and we work with architects with preservation backgrounds to design and oversee the projects. That’s why your dad came to me. He told me about the land development company that’s been asking about Carrowmore—the same group that built the high-end cluster home community and golf course over by Pawleys Island.”
“Sounds lovely,” I said, once again eager to leave. “Seeing as how I have barely any memories to connect me to this place, give them my number. I promise to pick up. Maybe I can convince Mama it’s a good time to sell.”
“Seriously, Larkin? I know the house looks bad, but it’s not a lost cause. It’s been owned by your family since the seventeen hundreds, and the land, right on the river—I can’t imagine them razing all of these old-growth trees and the house and putting cluster homes on it. It’s... obscene. That’s why your father wanted to talk to me. Hewanted to know if there might be other options. Like, I don’t know, maybe rebuilding it.”
“But why would we want to rebuild it?” We could both hear the frustration in my voice. “My parents are comfortable in their house, and I don’t live here anymore, remember? And it’s not like we have enough money for this kind of restoration.”
He fell silent, studying two martin houses hanging from the limbs of a nearby sweet gum tree. “But Ceecee does have the money. She controls the trust. For now, anyway.”
“The trust? What is that supposed to mean?”
He narrowed his eyes, as if unsure that I really didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. “The house, the land all the way down to the river, and the entire assets from the Carrowmore estate are held in a trust with Ceecee listed as trustee. Apparently, right before her accident, your mother visited a lawyer to contest Ceecee’s trusteeship of Carrowmore—even though she was the one who initially set up the trust, right after you were born. She apparently changed her mind, because she was asking the lawyer to transfer it to you now instead of waiting for your thirtieth birthday. That’s a condition of the trust. According to the lawyer, Ivy thought you had more right to oversee Carrowmore’s future since you’re a Darlington descendent.”
I could have listed a dozen things I’d expected him to say. That wasn’t one of them. “This is all meant to be mine in three years? Shouldn’t it go to my mother first?”
He shrugged. “It would seem so, but I don’t know the full story, so I don’t want to speculate.”
I realized I was shaking my head, and made myself stop. “But why would Mama do that now? And does Ceecee know?”
“Your daddy didn’t say. Just said Ivy didn’t want Ceecee to be making any decisions about Carrowmore. He did tell Ceecee—he thought she needed to know. I don’t think Ivy wanted either one of them to know, though. Your daddy found out about your mother’s visit to the lawyer accidentally. He answered your mama’s phone—it was the day of the accident, and she’d left it behind—and it was the lawyer asking for more details about the trust. Your daddy’s distraught enough rightnow that I didn’t want to bring it up with him, which is why I’ve been trying to talk with you.”
I stared back at him, wavering between guilt for not answering my texts and worry regarding my mother’s motivations. I shook my head. “I don’t know what to say, or think. This is all so... unexpected.”
“I’m sure it is. Like I said, your daddy didn’t explain. I’m guessing—and this is only speculation since I haven’t spoken with your mother directly—that she might have been trying to make it more difficult for the developers. Since you’re in New York and don’t pick up your phone and all.” His eyes remained cool and assessing, although I detected a hint of recrimination in his voice.
I continued to look at him, as if he might suddenly blurt out all the answers I was looking for. “I don’t know what to tell you, Bennett. I don’t know what I feel about this house, other than I don’t want it. I didn’t even know it existed before yesterday, much less that it’s been held in trust for me until I’m thirty. For the time being, its fate is in Ceecee’s hands, regardless of whether that’s the way my mother wants it to be. I say let’s wait until she wakes up and ask her.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
His words lashed out at me like a whip. “She will. Of course she will.” I wasn’t a doctor and had no understanding of what would be required for Mama to be okay again. Waking up was the scenario I’d decided upon, and I was moving ahead accordingly, just as I’d always done. Except for one glaring exception, my method had always worked.
“Ceecee... ,” he began, then stopped.
“Why do you care, Bennett? You don’t have any skin in this game.”
His face remained expressionless, but a shadow moved behind his eyes. “What do you know about the fire?”
“Besides that my grandmother died here? It happened the day after Hurricane Hazel in 1954. That’s all I know, and I just learned that yesterday. I really don’t know what’s worse—the horrible way that my grandmother died, or the fact that nobody ever thought to tell me.”
I could see the war going on behind his eyes, his weighing whether to tell me something. He’d always been easy to read, probably becauseI’d had years of practice. Finally, he said, “My granddaddy was the fire chief back then. Remember him?”
I nodded, vaguely remembering a gray-haired man who’d looked like a much older version of Bennett. His wife had died years before, and he lived alone in a fishing cabin on the Pee Dee River. He always had a stash of Hershey’s chocolate bars in his freezer. It was sad, I thought, that that was the one memory I had of him.
“He was on duty that night. Back in the day, most people didn’t evacuate for a hurricane. They just rode it out and dealt with the damage afterward, which is why all first responders were on call. A policeman saw the fire and radioed it in. By then the phone lines were gone and the electricity was out, so it was a miracle that a police cruiser was in the right place at the right time.”
He stopped then, and his eyes narrowed. That worried me. It meant he was about to tell me something I probably didn’t want to hear. “Larkin, Ceecee was in the house, too. She’s the one who pulled your mother out and saved her from the fire. But she couldn’t save Margaret.”
I reached behind me for my car door to lean against. I wasn’t completely sure I could remain standing on my own. “She saved my mother from the fire?”
