The Secret Daughter

“I have.”

“Then there’s no reason you can’t go home again, is there?”

“No reason at all,” Imogen said, the same pride that had kept her from reconciling with her mother rising up to back her into another kind of corner.

“And since you’re so mature, you’ll find it in your heart to kiss and make up with Mother?”

Well, why not? Imogen chewed the end of her pencil and considered the merits of such a move. Going home would necessarily mean raking up some painful aspects of the past, but wasn’t it time she laid to rest the ghosts that had haunted her for over eight years? The important thing was to be selective in her remembering, to focus only on her relationship with her mother and not to allow herself to become bogged down in useless regrets over a man who had never spared her a second thought once he’d introduced her to sex.

As long as she stuck to that resolve and remained in charge of her emotions, nothing could really go wrong. Or so she thought.

“All right, you’ve convinced me,” she told Tanya. “I’ll accept the invitation and see if I can’t work something out with my mother.”

But nothing went as planned, starting with her arrival, one afternoon toward the end of June, at Deepdene Grange, her family’s estate and possibly the only property in town whose house warranted the description “mansion.”

“Madam is not at home,” the maid, a total stranger, informed her, standing guard at the door as if she feared Imogen might take the place by storm.

Imogen stared at her, speechless. In the month before she’d set out from Vancouver, she’d suffered more than a few qualms about the wisdom of her decision to go home again, but her misgivings had taken serious hold when she’d picked up her rental car at Pearson International and headed northeast, away from the sticky humidity of Toronto and toward cottage country. What if all she did was make things worse and widen the gulf between her and her mother?

By the time she’d reached Clifton Hill, Rosemont’s toniest residential area, and turned in at Deepdene’s big iron gates, nervous anticipation the size and texture of a lump of clay hung in the pit of her stomach. But she’d come this far, and nothing, she thought, could deter her.

Except this.

“Not at home?” she echoed, shaking her head in the way people do when they’re not sure they understand the language being spoken.

The maid didn’t so much as blink. “I’m afraid not.”

But it was four o’clock on Saturday, the hour when, winter or summer for as far back as Imogen could remember, Suzanne Palmer had taken afternoon tea in the solarium prior to dressing for whatever social function she was holding or attending that evening.

As though to verify that she’d come to the right house, Imogen peered over the maid’s shoulder. The foyer looked exactly as it always had. The Waterford crystal chandelier sparkled in the sunlight, the carved oak banister gleamed, the hand-knotted Persian stair runner glowed softly. Even the bowl of roses on the console beneath the ornate gilt mirror might have been the very same as that occupying the identical spot, the day she’d walked out of her home almost nine years before, believing, at the time, that she would never return.

The maid shifted to block her view and narrowed the angle of the open door. “Who may I say called?”

“What?” Already becoming enmeshed in the past, Imogen gave herself a mental shake and steered her attention to the present. “Oh! Her daughter.”

Too well-trained to betray surprise by more than a faint lifting of her eyebrows, the maid said, “Madam is gone for the weekend but she should be home by late tomorrow afternoon. She didn’t mention anything about a guest.”

Unwilling to give her mother the chance to reject her a second time, Imogen had booked a room at the town’s only good hotel—a wise precaution indeed, since Suzanne Palmer clearly had declined to inform her current household staff that she had a daughter. “She wasn’t expecting me. I’m staying at the Briarwood. However, I would like to leave a note telling her I’m in town.”

“I’ll be happy to give her a message.”

“I’d prefer to leave a note.” Not giving her time to protest, Imogen stepped past the maid into the foyer.

She’d have thought her familiarity with the layout of Deepdene Grange and the exact location of her mother’s private sitting room would have lent credibility to her claim of having grown up in the house but, face tight with suspicion, the maid stuck to her like glue.

“Madam prefers not to have her private papers disturbed,” she objected, as Imogen sat at Suzanne’s pretty little Empire writing desk and lowered the lid.

“Madam” had preferred not to acknowledge her wayward daughter’s behavior nine years ago, but she hadn’t been able to change its outcome. “I’ll make sure you’re not held responsible for my actions,” Imogen said, “and if it eases your mind any, I have no intention at all of invading my mother’s privacy.”

In fact, though, she did just that. Reaching into one of the pigeonholes for a slip of paper, she accidentally dislodged a sheaf of canceled checks, some of which fluttered into her lap and others to the polished floor.

With an exclamation of distress, the maid stooped to retrieve those on the floor while Imogen gathered the rest. “No harm done,” she said, aligning hers into a neat pile by tapping the edges smartly on the desk.

“But they were arranged by number,” the young maid almost whimpered. “Madam is very particular about things like that.”

Then little had changed, after all! “She always was,” Imogen said, “but as long as they’re left the way I found them, she’ll never know the difference.”

Quickly, she shuffled the various checks into the proper sequence: number 489, made out to the Municipality of Rosemont for annual property taxes, number 488 to the telephone company and number 487, a tidy sum payable to St. Martha’s, her mother’s old private school, in Norbury, about forty miles west of Niagara Falls.

Imogen wasn’t unduly curious or surprised. Suzanne had always contributed generously to those causes she deemed worthy and prided herself on her largess. It was only where her daughter and certain segments of Rosemont society were concerned that she lacked charity.

With the checks restored to order and replaced in the desk, it took Imogen only a moment to write her note. “I’m not planning to stay in the area more than a few days,” she said, handing the folded slip of paper to the maid, “so I’d appreciate it if you’d make sure my mother receives this as soon as she comes home.”

She was barely out the door before the maid closed it behind her. Faced with empty hours to fill, Imogen drove slowly toward the center of town, searching out familiar landmarks and, despite her best intentions, remembering too much.

Banners proclaiming the town’s centennial anniversary flanked the columns fronting the courthouse, baskets of flowering plants hung from the wrought-iron lampposts on Main Street, Judge Merriweather’s house had been turned into an accountant’s office, and the old Rosemont Medical Building was now a youth center.

Once past the railroad station, Main Street split in two, the right lane following the curve of the lakeshore and the left leading to Lister’s Meadows, where the Donnellys used to live.

“Definitely the wrong side of the tracks,” her mother had determined when, the summer she turned fifteen, Imogen had insisted on attending a birthday party there. But Imogen had loved the friendly neighborliness of the area. Although the houses were small and close together, with long narrow gardens at the back, there were no fences separating one place from the next, no signs warning trespassers to stay away.

The Donnelly house had been at the end of the last street, she recalled, with a creek running beside it. But whether or not they’d moved, she had no idea. She and Patsy Donnelly had lost touch when Imogen went to stay with her mother’s cousin the autumn after her eighteenth birthday and Joe...

Oh, Joe Donnelly had not cared enough to pursue a relationship with Imogen Palmer and had left Ontario within days of his one-night stand with the richest girl in town. He did not deserve to be remembered.

So there was no earthly reason for her to head east to where Donnelly’s Garage used to be open for business fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. Did she seriously expect to see Sean Donnelly manning the pumps or Mr. Donnelly bent over the open hood of a car? Or Joe Donnelly straddling his idling Harley-Davidson and surveying the unending parade of girls willing to show off their physical assets in the hope of luring him even further into temptation than his natural inclination had already led him?

Apparently she did. How else to account for the wave of disappointment that washed over her when she saw that what used to be Donnelly’s Garage was now a slick, twelve-pump, self-serve gas station owned by a major oil company? She ought to have rejoiced that nothing remained to remind her.

“Oh, grow up, Imogen!” she muttered, annoyed by what could only be described as blatant self-indulgence. “Instead of wasting time dwelling on a man who, except for one memorable occasion, never spared you a second glance, think about what you’re going to say when you see your mother again because, whatever else might happen, at least she can’t deny you ever existed!”

Swinging the car in an illegal U-turn and consigning Joe Donnelly to that part of her past she had determined not to revisit, she headed to her hotel. It was almost six o’clock. By the time she’d showered and changed, it would be dinnertime.

Imogen’s room on the second floor of the Briarwood was handsomely furnished and looked out on the lake. Preferring the flower-scented breeze to the sterile discomfort of the air conditioner, she opened the French windows and stepped out on the small balcony overhanging the gardens. Immediately below, a wedding reception was in progress, with tables set out on the lawn and a wasp-waisted bride, lovely in white organza and orange blossom, holding court beneath an arbor of roses.

Imogen was unprepared for the envy that stabbed through her at the sight of that young woman. Not because she had a husband and Imogen had not—remaining single was, after all, her choice—but because the bride wore an air of innocence Imogen had lost when she was a teenager.

Though only just twenty-seven, she felt suddenly old. And bitter. By most standards, she had all those things that mattered in today’s world. She was successful, she had money, and men seemed to find her attractive enough that they asked her out often. One or two had even proposed marriage.

But inside, where it counted, she was empty. Had been empty for the better part of nine years. And it would take a lot more than a shower and a good dinner to restore her to the kind of optimism that left the bride so luminous with joy.

If only...

No! Grief softened with time, the sharp edge of heartbreak melted into kindly nostalgia, and only a fool dwelled on horror. She might have been born and raised in Rosemont, but her future lay half a continent away in Vancouver, and she’d do well to keep reminding herself of that.

The courthouse clock struck seven. Too keyed up to face dinner, Imogen changed out of the smart linen suit she’d worn for the meeting with her mother and slipped into a thin cotton dress and sandals. A brisk walk would go a lot further toward relaxing her and insuring a good night’s rest than beef Wellington or lobster thermidor in the formal elegance of the hotel dining room.

Although the air was warm, a slight breeze blew across the lake, stirring the surface of the water to dazzling ripples. Slipping on a pair of sunglasses, Imogen turned right at the foot of the hotel steps and headed west on the shoreline boardwalk, past the pier, the public beach and the band shell, then through the park, to end up some forty minutes later at what used to be the Rosemont Tea Garden.