Secrets at the Beach House Read online

  Dear Reader,

  Private Relations was my first novel. I was working as a hospital social worker as I wrote the story, and back then I approached my writing as a hobby. Gradually, that hobby became an obsession and after a few years, I had a complete manuscript – way too long and quite a mess! My agent and a few editors all had the same suggestions: focus on the romance between Kit and Cole, remove extraneous characters and subplots, and tighten, tighten, tighten. I took their advice and Private Relations sold to the first editor who saw the revised edition. It went on to win the RITA award for Best Single Title Contemporary Romance of 1989 – an incredible thrill for a newbie writer.

  I’ve made some very minor changes to the novel, mostly related to structure. I haven’t updated the story, though in a few instances I’ve changed a character’s behaviour or speech to be more in keeping with my present day thoughts and feelings. I’ve also added an epilogue to satisfy my longing to know what happened to these people I cared so much about. For the most part, though, I’ve left the story and its characters alone. I hope you’ll enjoy this tale of love and friendship, and I look forward to your thoughts.

  Diane Chamberlain, 2014

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  Epilogue

  THE STOLEN MARRIAGE

  PRETENDING TO DANCE

  THE SILENT SISTER

  THE ESCAPE ARTIST

  FIRE AND RAIN

  1.

  She only ran at night when she needed to escape. The Atlantic churned next to her, bottomless and black, and she played a game with it, matching four of her breaths to each crackling roll of its waves. It was her first after-dark run in Mantoloking, her first since she’d left Seattle where nearly every night she’d slammed the door on Bill and pounded the streets lined with identical houses until her head was free of him.

  The Chapel House came back into view, silvery in the moonlight and beckoning, as always. It was the first time she’d seen it from this angle at night. It rose out of the sand and the beach heather, a huge gray whale of a house, two stories high and rock solid. No storm could touch it. No wonder she felt so safe inside. The bay window of her bedroom reflected the moonlight in its wavy glass, and she knew that her whole room would be bathed in a pale yellow glow by now.

  She slowed her pace and climbed the hill to the house, spraying powdery sand behind her. The lights were still on in the living room, but maybe the others would be through talking about Cole by now. She was tired of listening to it, the glorification of him, the plans for his homecoming. She’d heard it all week at the hospital where nurses she’d respected were suddenly giggly with anticipation. And now she had to listen to it in the house as well. Odd how a man she’d never met was beginning to seem like her nemesis.

  They were just as she had left them, Janni cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, Jay stretched out on the blue camelback sofa, and Maris flung sideways across an overstuffed chair, the tiny gold sphere in her right nostril catching the glow from the fire.

  “Kit!” Janni jumped up. “We were getting worried about you. It’s not such a great idea for you to run on the beach at night.” She was six inches shorter than Kit, but she put an arm around her shoulders and led her toward the fire. “Sit with me,” she said.

  It was too hot to sit by the fire, but Kit let herself be pulled onto the pale Persian carpet without protest. When Janni gave an order you were expected to obey. Not that she minded. She knew in the darkest part of her heart that it was Janni’s attention she would miss most when Cole returned.

  She imagined Janni would want a fire every evening all summer long, just as she had during the spring. That was all right. Kit loved the big slate fireplace, and the blaze gave a cozy feeling to the enormous living room and its eclectic clutter of furniture.

  She remembered Janni’s response when she asked if she could move into the house for a while. “Only if you bring something for my living room,” Janni had said. Janni’d hardly needed any more furniture for the living room, but it was not aesthetics she’d had on her mind. Kit understood as soon as she set her wing chairs in the corner of the room and stood back to see them blend in with Maris’s sleek white couch, Jay’s camelback sofa, Cole’s antique French tables, and the patchwork of furniture Janni had inherited along with the house. The room was a melting pot. It tied them all together, made it hard to think about leaving.

  “How about a little after-run refreshment, Kit?” Jay held a bottle of Chardonnay in the air. Of the three of them he presented the most hedonistic image, lying on the camelback sofa, a wine glass in one hand, the bottle in the other. His rumpled plaid shirt was only half buttoned and completely free of his jeans, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looked as if his speech would be thickened by alcohol, but she was certain that he’d actually had very little to drink. At any moment the hospital might call about one of his patients, and he’d be instantly alert. In her six months in the Chapel House she’d seen it happen a dozen times. He would tuck in his shirt, make an attempt at smoothing his wild black hair with his hands, give Janni a quick kiss, and walk out the door without the slightest complaint over the hour or the intrusion on his privacy.

  “Just a sip, Jay,” she said. “I need to do a little work tonight.”

  “You work too hard, sweets,” Janni said, licking the rim of her wineglass.

  Kit stared at the flames, thinking that Janni had no idea what it was like to change careers at thirty-one, the effort it took. Janni Pitney had been the social worker on the Adolescent Unit at Blair Medical Center for the past eight years. Nothing was new to her. Nothing surprised her. But for Kit, every day held some fresh terror.

  They’d met two years ago at a conference in Seattle where Janni had presented a workshop on teen pregnancy. Kit had been fascinated by this diminutive woman dressed in a silk blouse and jeans—probably the only pair of jeans at the conference—strutting around in front of a group of overdressed, overly serious high school counselors. Janni was animated and confident, maybe just a tad too cocky. She looked like a teenager herself, although she was nearly thirty. Her fine, glossy dark hair swung when she moved; her long bangs touched the top of her glasses.

  Kit made a point of meeting her after the workshop, and for the next three days they were inseparable. She hadn’t felt that kind of emotional bond with a woman since college. She talked Janni into staying at her house instead of the hotel. Bill was rarely around, anyway. “He’s
at a meeting,” she told Janni the first night. The second night she told her the truth: she didn’t know where he was, and to be honest she didn’t care. She said it without anger because she felt none. She was at the point in her marriage where she felt trapped and numb. She’d grown dependent on a man who no longer meant anything to her.

  She moved to Mantoloking when she and Bill split up. It was the perfect choice for a fresh start—as far from Seattle as she could get. Janni persuaded her to apply for the Public Relations opening at Blair. Kit was interested but not optimistic. Why would they hire a high school counselor to do PR? But they did, and she always wondered if Janni—or maybe Jay—had had something to do with it. That worried her. She’d spent the last six months trying to prove she was worthy of the job.

  She loved the work. It was a relief taking care of an institution instead of the people inside it for a change, and her confidence was growing. But today the old insecurities had surfaced again.

  “I got a new assignment this morning,” she said, her eyes on her housemates. “I have total responsibility for the PR on the Fetal Surgery Program.” Just saying it out loud made her jittery. She didn’t know why the director had handed this to her. It felt like a test to see if she’d sink or swim under pressure, but why would they take that risk with something so important? Her coworkers, all of whom had been there longer than she had, seemed as confused as she was by her selection. A little miffed as well. They’d been talking for months about the Fetal Surgery Program and the PR challenge it presented. Competition for funding the program was stiff. Five medical centers on the east coast were battling for the funds already. So why had this honor been bestowed on the only person in the department who wanted nothing to do with it?

  “That’s fantastic, Kit.” Janni grinned at her. “That’s one of the biggest things Blair’s ever gone after.”

  Jay sat up. “Cole’s got four years of his life tied up in planning that program. I’m impressed they’d give it to you.” His tone was complimentary, but the words felt like a warning.

  “I don’t want to be responsible for four years of someone’s life,” Kit said. “I want to say, no, sorry, I can’t do it, but I’m still playing the game . . . you know, pretending I’m competent, and I’m afraid that if I turn it down they’ll know I’m a fraud.”

  The three of them smiled at her. Even Maris’s usual melancholy expression had lifted.

  “You’re good, Kit,” said Janni. “If you’re pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes, it’s only your own.”

  “You’re going to love working with Cole,” said Maris.

  Kit wasn’t so sure. She’d heard Cole could be demanding and temperamental. He’d spent the last nine months researching fetal surgery techniques in Paris, and he’d come back ready to put the program in gear. He’d have high expectations of the person assigned to the PR.

  “I guess it’s about time I got to meet this guy,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “I’ve heard enough about him. The women at Blair are constantly pumping me for information on him.”

  Jay laughed. “The Chapel House has fueled the hospital grapevine for many years.”

  His accent made her smile. Unmistakably Brooklyn. How could anyone well-educated sound like that? She’d been shocked when she first met him. He sounded like a high school dropout, and looked like the kind of guy most people would cross the street to avoid—big and brawny with a mop of unruly dark hair. She tried to imagine how his surgery patients felt the first time they met him, when they pictured this thug taking a knife to them in the operating room.

  But close up he had the face of a man at ease with himself, calm and unflappable. His placid style was the perfect foil for Janni’s theatrics. They’d been balancing each other for a decade.

  “The nurses used to ask me if I actually lived with both Jay DeSantis and Cole Perelle,” Janni said now. “And I’d tell them, ‘yes, and with another woman, Maris Lavender, too.’ You could see the wheels turning as they tried to imagine what decadent things went on inside these four walls.”

  The four of them laughed, sharing a kinship Kit was pleased to be part of. How would she fit in when Cole returned? She was the newcomer. Cole’s inferior substitute. After all, he’d been with the others for years. His room was directly across the wide upstairs hall from hers, and even though he’d been away, Janni still had the housekeeper dust his antique French furniture and keep the shimmer on the hardwood floors.

  Maris had been in the Chapel House just a year and a half longer than Kit, but she had a connection to it that couldn’t be taken from her. She was an architect and Janni and Jay had hired her a few years earlier to help with remodeling. Her touch was everywhere, her innovations always dramatic, like the huge half-circle windows in the living room and the intricate tile design of tropical fish that circled the kitchen on the backsplash above the counters.

  Sometime near the end of the remodeling, Maris’s husband was killed. Kit wondered what project she’d been working on when she learned of his death. Was there some patch of hardwood floor, perhaps, that she couldn’t look at now without remembering what she’d lost? She’d moved into the house just a few days after his death. A smart move, Kit thought. This was the place to be when you needed to piece your life back together.

  It had taken Kit a while to realize that the gloom in Maris’s face was not the result of Kit’s moving in and that Maris was, in fact, pleased to have her there. She helped Kit settle into her room, planned dinner menus with her, took her out to lunch. Kit liked being with her. The company was low-key and comfortable. And she liked Maris’s dark, exotic looks—her warm spice-colored skin, the eyes a pale brown, nearly gold, with sharp black rings around the irises.

  By contrast, Kit was fair. “Alabaster skin and angel hair,” Bill had said once, when he was still interested enough to notice. There was something ethereal about her hair with its soft, unruly curls. She never wore it longer than chin length—any longer and she’d have to spend most of the day sorting out the tangles. It framed her face with a blend of colors—dark honey, a little gold, a touch of red. A hairdresser once told her she was lucky her skin was so pale—any color in her face would have competed too much with her hair, he said. Her gray eyes were competition enough.

  “I can’t believe Cole’s moving in with Estelle,” Maris said now.

  “He’s not going to live here?” Kit tried to hide the relief in her voice.

  “You weren’t here when I read his letter.” Janni fondled the thin blue envelope on the carpet in front of her. “He and Estelle are moving in together. I think she’s tired of sharing him with the rest of us.” There was no sympathy for Estelle in her voice.

  “He’s moving into Estelle’s condominium.” Maris wrinkled her nose as though the elegant Point Pleasant condominium were the equivalent of a gym locker.

  “He’s coming back a few weeks before she does—she’s still working on the translating—and going straight to the condo,” Janni said. “He says he doesn’t want to take a chance coming here first. He’s afraid he wouldn’t be able to leave.”

  Kit understood. There was something about this house that drew you in, soothed you, then drugged you a little so you lacked the motivation to leave. She’d meant her stay in the house to be a mere stopover, a month, no more. But the evenings with her housemates were hard to give up. It was new to her, coming home to people who cared what had happened to her during the day, who squeezed her hand when she walked in the house with a frown.

  She leaned away from the fireplace to look up at the picture above the mantel. It was a photograph of the house, huge, blown up many times from a snapshot that Cole had taken. The view was from the street side, on a day when the air was gray and threatening. The house blended into the sky, everything the color of pewter. Even the small patch of lawn in the center of the circular driveway had taken on a vaporous gray hue. You could tell it was Christmas time, though. Each of the thirty windows glowed with the faint silver light of an elec
tric candle. It was a beautiful picture, misty and surreal. Obviously this house meant something to Cole. She wondered how he could leave.

  Janni opened his letter and reread it to herself. “I can’t stand this part where he asks if he can use our beach this summer,” she said. “Our beach! It’s his beach, too, it always will be. We have to let him know that.”

  “It’s not the end of the world, Jan,” Jay said softly.

  “How can you take his moving out so calmly? After ten years?” Janni asked him.

  “Eleven for me,” said Jay. He and Cole had been together since medical school. “I’ve always expected this to happen. He and Estelle can hardly settle down together living in two different places.”

  Maris sniffed. “I thought it was a superb arrangement.”

  “Superb for us maybe, but Estelle never got much of his time,” Jay said.

  Janni had rested her head against his knees. Now she pulled it away as if punishing him for the thought. “How can you be so sympathetic toward her?” she asked.

  “She’s not that bad.”

  “Oh, Jay, she’s a bitch!” said Janni.

  “You’re sounding pretty bitchy yourself.” He cushioned his words by stroking her cheek with the back of his fingers.

  “If Cole’s so terrific, why would he want someone who’s not?” Kit asked.

  Maris swiveled in her chair to face Kit, curling her long cinnamon-colored legs beneath her. “Cole has one monumental flaw,” she said. “He’s a sucker for beauty. When you meet Estelle you’ll understand.”

  She already knew Estelle was beautiful. The women who worked at Blair had described every inch of her in elaborate detail. In voices edged with contempt—or was it envy?—they talked about how Estelle could transform a stiffly tailored suit into something soft and seductive merely by putting her body into it. And you could always see lace beneath her blouses. Nothing lurid, they were quick to admit, but still it couldn’t help but provoke the imagination, could it? Some of them said they remembered seeing her picture in magazines years ago when she modeled lingerie for Caprice and Company.

  No one mentioned that Estelle could translate medical terminology into six languages and that she was indirectly responsible for Blair’s international status—the status those same women saw reflected in their paychecks. No one mentioned it at Blair, and no one was mentioning it now, here at the house.