“Hungry?” his mother asked, her sharp eyes drilling into him.
“Yup. In need of some Texas-size Angus beef grilled by my own hands.” He turned to make his way back to the house.
“There is something you’re not telling me,” she called out.
He smiled over his shoulder. “Yeah, there is. I’d like some apple pie with that steak. Any chance that can happen?”
She skipped a step to keep up with him. “How about cobbler?”
He draped his arm over her shoulders again and walked the rest of the way back.
After the First Wives intervention, Trina skipped the flight to Texas and detoured to New York. Lori and Shannon both returned to Los Angeles, and Avery tagged along with Trina.
The Hamptons home she’d shared in her brief marriage to Fedor had been vacant for nearly one year. She stood at the steps, looking up into the dark windows and pulled shades. The gray, cloudy sky matched her mood.
“You know what this place is missing?” Avery asked.
“What?”
“Eerie Halloween music and fake fog.”
Avery’s reference to All Hallows Eve wasn’t because there were overgrown weeds and dead trees, but the air that surrounded the house itself.
The outside was perfectly maintained, and inside, Trina knew she’d find the same. The company she’d hired to manage the home after she’d moved was in charge of weekly cleaning and maintenance, and Cindy, her old housekeeper, supervised. Something Trina had become very accustomed to dealing with after inheriting nearly half a dozen homes. This one she had no intentions of ever living in again, so she’d let the staff go with severance packages and letters of recommendation.
Trina looked over her shoulder and past the gates and wondered if any of the neighbors paid attention to who came and went. Probably not. The homes were spaced out enough to not see those who lived next door for weeks, if at all. One would think a home that would fetch over fifteen million dollars would have someone living inside, but many of the homes in this area were weekend and summer getaways. This one going unoccupied for a year probably wasn’t even noticed.
“It’s going to take me a few days to go through everything,” Trina told Avery for the third time.
“Yeah, you’ve already said that. Like you, I don’t have a job, so here I am. Ready to go through the Ghost of Christmas Past’s shit.”
Trina was glad for it. She didn’t want to do this alone. Her mother had volunteered to help, but Trina wasn’t about to encourage that. Her parents still had no idea her marriage to Fedor was a complete fallacy. The lie she’d told the world was only known by the First Wives, Fedor, and the employees of Alliance. That was the way it would forever stay.
“Let’s do this.” Avery took the first steps toward the door.
Inside was exactly as Trina remembered. Dark stained wood floors, high ceilings, white painted walls, and lots of windows where the shades and window treatments were closed. She caught the alarm and pressed in the code to disarm, and then stood in silence.
“We need to open this place up.” Avery went to work even as she said the words. She marched through the foyer and into the main living room and pulled back the drapes. Even the gray light coming in from outside helped the mood of the house. She pushed open the window with a grunt. “Deal with the cold. It smells like a coffin in here.”
Trina winced.
“Sorry.”
Rooted in place, Trina just stared at the familiar space. “Wait until you go into Fedor’s office in the back.”
“Point me in a direction and I’ll do it.”
“Let’s deal with the big house first.” Trina shook out of her fog and headed back outside. “I’ll get our suitcases.”
It had started to drizzle in the few minutes they’d been inside. Instead of rushing, Trina took her time pulling her suitcase from the trunk of the rental car she and Avery had picked up at the airport. She looked toward the four-car garage and remembered the car she had inside. She wasn’t even sure if the registration was paid on the thing. Fedor had bought it for her when she’d moved in and said he would take care of all of it, even after they were divorced. Now it sat in a garage with two more of Fedor’s cars, collecting dust.
What a shame.
A waste of life Fedor had pissed away by squeezing the trigger.
The Hamptons home was never meant to be hers. Although he did promise a postdivorce compromise that would keep anyone from guessing their marriage was an arrangement. That compromise was never fully developed. Once again, cut short by Fedor’s decision, and that of Alice’s estate landing in Trina’s lap.
With Fedor’s death, the money he’d earned on his own had ended up back in the family money with Everson Oil. He’d known his mother wasn’t going to live long, so he’d had his attorney write up a plan to give his estate to his aunts. If his attorney questioned why the money wasn’t to be left to Trina, she’d never heard.
After Fedor’s death, and Alice’s, his aunts wanted to give Trina all of Fedor’s assets.
She outright refused, and the funds went in the general pot of the oil company, which still ended up giving Trina a third of Fedor’s estate. It was obvious she wasn’t going to escape the money, so when Andrea and Diane asked that Trina deal with the Hamptons home, Trina agreed. Considering the aunts had only been in the place a couple of times, it only seemed right that Trina manage the sale.
A twig snapped behind her, making Trina swivel her head in that direction.
Nothing.
She glanced down to find a cat sitting and watching her expectantly.
“Who are you?” Trina asked, as if the cat would answer.
She knelt down and put out her hand, willing the animal to approach. Instead, the gray and white cat scurried in the opposite direction and disappeared behind the garage.
Another noise to her left had her thinking that maybe there was a colony of feral cats close by. But instead of seeing another feline friend, there was nothing.
She sighed and hoisted Avery’s suitcase from the car, pulled the handles on both bags, and closed the trunk.
Trina screamed.
“What?” Avery jumped back.
Trina blinked, her heart in her chest. “Don’t scare me like that.”
“I thought you heard me coming.”
She willed her pulse to slow down. “No. Geez.”
“Here, let me help.”
Trina let Avery drag her own overstuffed bag and quickly followed her inside.
Not that the interior of the house helped at all with the calming of her nerves.
“We need some music in here,” she told Avery.
“Maybe a certain country singer?” Avery teased.
That made Trina smile. “Not a bad idea. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard Wade’s music.”
“I doubt that’s possible.”
By the time Trina dropped her bag in her old room and placed Avery’s in the closest guest room, Avery had already found the stereo and Bluetoothed her phone to it.
Sure enough, Wade’s lighthearted southern drawl filled the house and made Trina smile.
“I know this song,” she said, surprised.
“Told you.” Avery held a pen and a notebook. “Let’s start a list so I can go to the grocery store. I think it’s going to take at least a week. This place is huge.”
“Yeah.”
“Are these originals?” Avery asked, looking at the art on the walls.
“I have no idea.”
“If they are, there will be paperwork somewhere. We should find an art dealer. Unless you want any of them.”
Trina looked at the wall as if seeing the art for the first time. “No, I don’t . . .”
Avery spun around. “I forgot how big this place was.”
“Me too.”
“Show me around again.”
Trina headed to the stairs to do just that.
Chapter Ten
They’d finished a bottle of wine, which seemed to be the theme of their friendship, and boiled some gourmet pasta, which they ate with a tossed green salad.
But when Avery couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer, Trina was faced with sleeping in her old room. Not that there were memories of Fedor there. But beyond the adjoining door was his personal space, which she hadn’t yet tackled.
With a laundry basket full of clean clothes, she pulled on a nightgown she hadn’t seen in a year and went through the motions of getting ready for bed. Once she kicked her feet up, her eyes traveled to the door between the rooms.
She tapped her fingers, looked away, and then jumped from the bed.
She hesitated for only a second before swinging the door open.
There wasn’t a bogeyman, or even a ghost, just an empty room with a perfectly made bed and clean floor. Like her bedroom, Fedor’s was left the way he had kept it. The nightstand held a book, but the title wasn’t one Trina had heard of. She padded barefoot to his dresser and lifted the cologne she recognized as his unique scent. Three of the wooden figures he himself had carved sat perfectly placed next to a lamp. He often carried a whittling knife and dabbled in the pastime when he wanted to relax. A picture of Fedor and his mother sat next to a picture of the two of them on their wedding day.
Trina lifted it up and remembered when she’d picked out the image to print. Very few of the pictures captured her in a relaxed state. Much as she had to be an actress for everyone watching, it wasn’t a job she was good at. But this picture was caught with Fedor whispering in her ear. She still remembered his words. “Just think, everyone in this room is going to have sex tonight except you and me.”