"I hate her," Sadie said. "I don't mean I dislike her. I mean I hate her right down to my bone marrow. With every molecule I possess. I stay awake at night planning ways to kill her. At first I thought of putting her in her place with some witty remark that would reduce her to rears, but now I think of blood. You want to hear the latest thing I've come up with?"
Sara wanted to say that she'd rather do most anything than hear yet another method Sadie had come up with for killing Casper Martins nanny. But Sara knew she had to be nice, if for no other reason than because Sadie was her husband Carter's friend. And, more importantly, because Sadie came from four generations of money and Carter's law firm was handling all the business of Sadie's father's company. "I lose that account and I might as well kiss my job good-bye," Carter had said the morning after she'd met Sadie. "I know she can be a bit hard to take sometimes, but her family is rich and I need the business. Do it for me, will you?"
As always, Sara had agreed.
"What did you come up with?" Sara asked, trying to smile at Sadie, but she wanted to ask if she'd yet wheeled a marriage proposal out of Casper Martins. Why didn't Casper just go ahead and marry Sadie?
"You're not afraid that if she doesn't marry him, she will go after Carter, are you?" her mother had asked last week.
"No, of course not. That's absurd," Sara quickly said, but it had sounded false even to her. That's exactly what she was afraid of.
Her husband and Sadie had been "old friends" since college. However, Sara's idea of friends and theirs didn't seem to be the same. Carter and Sadie hadn't been study buddies, nor had they run around together in a group. No, they had been lovers, "almost engaged" was the way Sadie put it. They had met on the first day they entered Kingston and had been inseparable for almost three years. "We taught each other everything we know about anything," Sadie said the first time Sara met her, howling with laughter over the double entendre. The first time she'd met Sadie, Sara worked for a day and a half preparing a meal that Carter would declare fit for his old "friend." At the time, Sara had no idea what kind of friendship they'd had.
"Remember the time we went out with Cassie and Leo and the car broke down?" Sadie asked, waving a piece of roast about on her fork. "There we were, stuck in the middle of nowhere, and it began to rain." She took a sip of her wine, barely able to hold in her laughter. "But there was a motel down the road so we—" She broke off, sliding eyes sideways at Sara. "Oops, better not tell that story."
"More potatoes?" Sara asked, holding out the bowl even though Sadie hadn't touched what she'd already taken. In Sara' eyes, Sadie was a walking ad for "eating disorder."
"No thanks," Sadie said, seeming to be oblivious to Sara's discomfort. Or was she? Sara wondered. Could she be as unaware of other people as she pretended to be?
"You have to forgive me," Sadie said. "It's just that we had such great times in college. Carter must have told you all about me."
"No," Sara said smiling. "Carter never said a word about you."
She'd meant for Sadie to see bow unimportant she was to her husband's life, but Sadie took it differently. " Carter darling, you dog! Keeping me a secret. Really!"
Carter was sitting at the head of the polished, antique table and grinning. He wore an aura of contentment, as thought everything he wanted was sitting at the table with him. And maybe it was, Sara thought as she excused herself to go to the kitchen to get more rolls.
She got the bread but she didn't go back into the dinning room. Instead, she went into the sunroom and looked out the back window. It was a summer now and the leaves blocked her view, but sometimes in the winter she could see the water of the James River.
When Carter had first shown her the site he'd purchased, Sara had been ecstatic. Most of the plots in Hamilton Savier were fat little squares, but there were a few that were on the curves of the new streets, and they were long and narrow. That meant she and Carter could put in a long driveway and the house would be at the back of the property. Instead of having houses on each side of them, they would be nestled in the trees. Over 35 percent of the subdivision was to be left as conservation area, never to be built on. All Sara could think of was what would be good for tbe children they would have. She'd been an only child, but Carter had come from a family with ten children. It was both their dreams to have at least five.
Those had been happy days, Sara thought as she looked out at the woods that she knew led down to the water. The house they would bukid would have room for all the children band they'd have a wonderful place to play. Through the woods to the east were lots of little houses, but next door, to the west, was the only true mansion in Hamilton Savier. As soon as plans for the new gated community were announced, someone had bought six plots and started building an enormous house. It wasn't until nearly two years later that they found out the resident was to be Margaret Buddlon.
Sara heard her husband and Sadie laughing in the dinning room and dreaded going back in there. She and Carter had never had wild weekends in a motel before they were married. But then, to be fair, she'd refused to go to bed with him until after they were married— which she was sure was why he did marry her. Sometimes at night she could see lights from the Buddlon mansion, but no one ever saw the Great Lady herself. She had employees to run her errands, and when she did go out, she rode in a black limo with darkened windows.
Years ago, Sara had dreams of her polite, courteous children befriending the old woman and.... She hadn't thought much past that, but she had imagined mentioning to people that "Margaret and I...."
But none of it ever happened. Not the children and certainly not meeting the woman who had been called "the greatest actress who ever lived."
Instead, she and Carter had walked through the woods and they'd met Casper Martins there. Like them, he'd built a house on one of the few long, skinny pieces of land. His house on one of the other side of the Buddlon mansion.
But there the similarities between the families ended. Casper's wife died less than a year after they moved in, just months after she gave birth to their daughter. When they met Casper, he was so overtaken with grief that he was just a shell of a human being. Even when he was with his daughter, his eyes were empty, dead.
It had been as natural as breathing that Sara had taken over baby Taylor's weekday care after Laura died. Sara had helped Casper hire nannies, but they had been glad to turn the child to Sara. Gradually, as the years passed and Sara had no children of her own, her weekdays had begun to revolve around Taylor.
Carter saw what his wife was feeling and warned her not to get too attached. "Some woman will go after Casper and he won't stand a chance," he said, his dark eyes sparkling. "Like you did to me."
As always, Sara had protested that she'd done nothing tob"catch him," as she liked to say.
Carter had rolled his eyes and smiled. "Red silk. Black lace. Skirts cut up to here, but 'no touch.' You make torturers of the Spanish Inquisition seem tame."
Sometimes she loved his teasing; sometimes she hated it.
He'd been right about little Taylor, but right in a different way. It wasn't a wife who came in and took over, but a shy young woman with big eyes, lots of thick hair, and a way of looking at Casper that was embarrassing to everyone who saw it. She was named Mabel, and she seemed to love Taylor with all her heart.
The first time Sara saw her was when she'd heard voices at the tiny strip of beach that was at the bottom of the Buddlon property. By rights, it was a private property, but no one ever went to the bit of sand except Carter and her, Casper and his daughter.
But one day, there was Taylor with a young woman Sara had never seen before, and they were laughing and playing as though they'd known each other all their lives. As Sara stayed hidden in the trees and watched, she felt such a sense of loss that it was as though something inside her had broken. Pretty, quiet, motherless Taylor was the closest thing she had to having her own child. And now she'd been taken away as completely as though she'd moved to another country. That day, Sara had walked back to her house, made herself a gin and tonic, then got on her hands and knees and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Five days later, when Casper introduced her to Taylor's new nanny, Sara tried to be polite, but she felt such anger at the young woman for stealing what should have been hers that she couldn't keep her upper lips from curling.
Since then, Sara had been polite to the woman, but she couldn't bring herself to be nice to her. And the truth was that the reason she put up with Sadie without a protest was because if Casper and Sadie married, that girl Mabel, would go, and maybe Taylor would be given back to Sara. Heaven knew that Sadie wouldn't want the day-to-day care of a child. In the months after that first dinner, Sara had helped Sadie tone down her way of dressing and the way she said whatever came to her head. She didn't want Sadie to offend Casper. For all that it had been years since his wife's death, Casper was still a man in grief, and he wasn't ready for a woman who liked to tell stories about how she and a boyfriend had tried to do all the positions in the Kama Sutra.
So now, Sara smiled and listened to Sadie rant about Mabel.