First Frost (21 page)

The person at the front door turned when he heard her footsteps in the fallen tulip tree leaves. He crossed the porch and stood at the top of the steps and looked down at her.

It was the old man in the gray suit.

“Claire Waverley?” he asked in a voice as smooth as warm butter. “My name is Russell Zahler.”

Claire tucked her hair behind her ears nervously, not taking her eyes off the man. It was
him.
The stranger, the specter who had haunted the edges of her life all week. “You've been outside my house for days,” she said.

“It's a very nice house.” He walked down the steps and stopped a few feet in front of her. He put his hands in his trouser pockets and looked at the house. It gave her time to study him, his closely cropped silver hair and his pale skin. His eyes were pale, too, a silvery gray like dimes. “You've done well for yourself.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

He took a step away from her, as if to assure her. “I've scared you. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I had no idea how to approach you. I wasn't sure what to say.”

“You were speaking to Patrice Sorrell and her sister Tara about me, weren't you?” she asked. “On Saturday afternoon, downtown.”

He nodded. “I was just making sure I got the right person.”

“The right person for what?”

He reached into his interior suit pocket and brought out a folded page that looked like it had been ripped from a magazine. “It's a long story, but it starts with this. I was waiting to see my doctor last month when I read this in a magazine.”

He handed her the page, and she immediately recognized it. It was the article in
Southern Living
about her candy. She found herself smiling, because her initial thought amused her. Was this her first fan?

“I have this bad heart, you see. Oh, it's nothing serious. I've got my pills for it. That's why I was at the doctor's office. My kids always make sure I go to my appointments. I saw this story about you, and I knew I recognized your name. When I looked you up on my granddaughter's computer, I found this, too.”

He took another page out of his pocket, this one a photocopied interview Claire had given to a popular foodie blog called “Sweet Baby Mine,” right after the
Southern Living
article hit the stands. She'd given a lot of interviews back then, giddy with it, before everything got so busy, so complicated.

He had not one but two features about her? Who was this person?

“I'm an old man now,” Russell said. “Before I die, I had to set this straight. I had to come see you. You see this quote, right here? If you'll allow me,” he said, taking the page of the blog interview back from her. “You say here, ‘If I weren't a Waverley, then these candies wouldn't sell. Because what I'm selling is my name, my heritage. Waverley women are mysterious and magical women with a long and well-known history in the South. These candies are
their
candies, made from their secrets. Their blood flows through me. That's what makes the candy special. That's what makes
me
special.'”

Claire raised her brows at him when he finished reading.

“This article, you see, it's all wrong,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Another reach into his pocket. Another paper pulled out. This time a photograph. He handed it to her.

It was a photo from the 1970s of four people sitting in a curved booth the color of cinnamon. There was a full ashtray and a half-dozen beer bottles on the scarred table in front of them. Russell Zahler, forty years younger, was sitting next to a pretty young woman with light hair and a restless look in her eyes. He had his arm around her. A dark-haired man and woman were with them. The dark-haired woman was holding a toddler.

Claire felt light-headed. She walked to the porch steps and sat down. Russell Zahler followed at a respectful distance, lowering himself slowly to the step beside her.

Claire had precious few photos left of her mother. Sometimes she couldn't even remember clearly what she looked like. The sound of her voice was completely lost. This felt like a little piece of her coming back to her. She pointed to the light-haired woman in the photo, the one sitting next to Russell Zahler, sitting next to him like Claire was doing right now. “That's … that's my mother.”

Russell Zahler nodded.

Claire used her finger to trace over the toddler the other woman in the photo was holding. It was Claire, scraggly brown hair and big brown eyes, in the arms of a stranger. She had her thumb in her mouth and was staring into space, going to that quiet place that used to soothe her, while the rest of them laughed as though there was nothing wrong with a child her age being around booze and cigarettes. Claire could barely remember that time in her life, but she remembered her quiet place. Her mother had never let anything bad happen to her, but there had always been that danger. Claire had always hated the danger. But her mother had lived on it.

“Lorelei and I dated, years ago,” Russell said. “I was working in Shawnee, Oklahoma, just passing through. So was she. We were like meteors colliding. She was a wild one, that Lorelei. Not easy to forget.”

Claire felt her fingertips go numb. Claire was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She had never said this to another living soul, not even her own sister, but Claire had dreamed about this happening most of her life. That must be why this man seemed so familiar to her, why she felt she knew him. This photograph explained why she smelled what she did when he was around, the smoke, the beer, her mother's lip gloss. Those few scents were ingrained in her memory of her mother. Claire had spent more time in bars the first few years of her life than she had for all the rest of her years combined as her mother had carted her around the country, restless as the wind, before Sydney was born, before Lorelei brought them to Bascom.

She turned to Russell and studied his face. Although probably in his eighties, which was twenty years older than her mother would have been, the years had been kind to him. But the folds of his skin made it hard to decipher his bone structure. Was there
anything
of him in her? she wondered.

She asked in a small, dry voice, “Are you my father?”

He shook his head. “No, honey. I'm not your father.”

She gave a shaky nod, embarrassed for some reason, for letting that little bit of desperation out.

“And Lorelei Waverley isn't your mother, either,” he added.

*   *   *

“Your real mother was named Barbie Peidpoint,” Russell Zahler said from the other side of her office desk. The house still wouldn't let him in the front door, so Claire had led him around back and into her office. Distracted, she'd left the pot of slow-boiling sugar and water and corn syrup on the stove, and she'd served him coffee because that seemed like the polite thing to do. He'd come all this way, from Butte, Montana, he'd said. She thought maybe he was travel-weary, or slightly addled. She wondered if he had family or friends she could contact, because this story he was telling didn't make sense. He'd mentioned his children. How could she contact them?

“Barbie was a sickly woman,” he continued. “You can see how skinny she was, holding you as a baby. She died about three years after that photo was taken. Something was wrong with her heart, apparently. Your dad there was Ingler Whiteman. We worked together for a while. He died, too, a couple of years later. Got hit by a train.”

Claire shook her head and told him what she'd been telling him all along. “My mother was Lorelei Waverley, not this woman.”

But Russell kept circling, very subtly but persistently bringing his point home. “I was surprised that you were here in this town,” he said. “Lorelei always hated this place. Bascom, North Carolina. Too small. Too weird. She was always trying to escape herself, escape this
legacy,
as she called it, how all the women in her family had these talents no one could explain. I never thought she'd come back.”

Claire conceded that he did seem to know a lot about her mother. But that didn't mean he was right. “She didn't come back. Well, she came back for a while. Then she left me and my sister here.”

“She had wings that couldn't stop flying,” Russell said.

“She died. A long time ago,” she said, as gently as she could, thinking maybe he was hoping to find her.

“I know. I read it in the paper when it happened. That big pileup in Tennessee. It made national news. Lorelei Waverley,” he said with a nostalgic sigh. “I hadn't thought of her since. Not until I read about you in that magazine. I recognized the name Waverley, and then the name of this town. That's when I realized
you
were Donna. That's your real name. You're the baby in that photograph.”

The smell of sugar just before it burns, a sweet, smoky scent, filled the air. The pot she'd left on the stove. Claire wanted to go to it, but she couldn't seem to move out of her chair. “I admit that I don't have any photos of myself before I was six, so I can't say for sure. But the time line fits, and this does look like me. But just because this other woman is holding me doesn't mean she's my mother. You've gotten this all wrong.”

“You can't deny the resemblance,” he said, looking at her over his coffee cup as he took a sip. He'd never taken his silver eyes off of her, watching her every expression, her every tick.

Claire looked at the photo she was holding again. Yes, the woman had dark hair and eyes like Claire, and, yes, the man had a long nose like her. “It doesn't mean we're related,” Claire said. “What would my mother be doing with another woman's child? She didn't even like children.”

“They weren't model citizens, Barbie and Ingler. Maybe Lorelei thought she was saving you. Or maybe she just wanted something to steal. One night she was gone, and so were you. They looked for you for years before they died.”

“You've obviously traveled a long way for nothing, Mr. Zahler.”

“Oh, not for nothing, I assure you,” Russell said, crossing his legs.

She held out the photo across the desk for him to take, but he didn't. She was beginning to get a bad feeling. He wasn't addled. She could see, too late, that he knew exactly what he was doing.

“You're getting national exposure. Your business is growing. Everyone I've talked to in town has mentioned your candy business, how things are only going to get bigger for you. But building something on reputation alone has its drawbacks. If the foundation is weak, everything falls down like a house of cards.”

The air around her turned anxious and electric. The overhead light dimmed slightly, then brightened, like a power surge.

“Proof can be gotten,” Russell said, brushing imaginary lint off his pant leg. “There's no doubt about that. I'm guessing your mother forged your birth certificate. It would be pretty easy to tell these days. And I've been asking people here about your family. Excuse me, I mean the Waverleys. You have a sister and a niece and an old cousin. They all have something about them that people talk about with awe. They are magic ones, aren't they? The ones Lorelei talked about. A quick DNA test would be able to tell you with certainty that you aren't related. But you don't have to do that, do you, Claire? You've always known. You aren't any more special than I am. Although I must say, we're both good at faking it.”

It felt like she was falling, but there was no place to land. “What do you want?”

“You know what I want. Your financials are public record. I'll come back tomorrow for a cashier's check. I'm sure that will give you enough time.” He stood and smiled at her, taking a small piece of paper from his pocket and setting it in front of her. On it was the amount he wanted. It wasn't an easy amount to part with—there went her summer profit—but she
could
afford it. “It doesn't have to be this hard, Claire. Cheer up. I could tell you all about your real mother and father, to give you more of a sense of who you are. Everyone needs to know who they really are, don't they? You said you don't have a photo of yourself before age six? Keep that one. I have copies. I have copies of everything.”

She heard him leave by the back door. She could almost feel the floorboards under her tremble with tension.

She remembered the blog reporter for “Sweet Baby Mine” asking her, “If you didn't have Waverley blood in your veins, would this venture be as successful?”

And she had answered, without hesitation, “No.”

Because if she wasn't a Waverley, then none of this was real,
she
wasn't real.

The burned sugar smell was getting stronger. She finally got up and went to the stove. The candy syrup had not yet burned all the way down, but it had turned dark brown, like toast.

She had to save the large pot. She had several, all rotated around the stoves in various candy-making stages, but they were expensive, so she removed the candy thermometer and took the pot to the sink, holding it by one side with a potholder. That's when she realized that she hadn't thought far enough ahead. She was left holding the pot, but had nothing to scrape out the burned syrup. It had to be done while the mixture was still warm, or it would harden to the pot like cement. She saw the spatula Evanelle had given her, sitting on the kitchen windowsill, and she smiled in relief, like someone had thrown her a rope into a dark cavern.

Things weren't all bad. She'd saved the pot.

She scraped the syrup out and immediately got to work on another batch of candy. She would focus on Russell Zahler later. This had to be done first. It had to be a sign that Evanelle's gift had been nearby. It meant she should work. It meant,
Don't think about it now.

But everything she touched for the next hour scalded, broke or gave the wrong measurements. A cup of sugar poured out only a teaspoon. Stove dials turned on the wrong burners. Her despair was filling the kitchen, threading into everything she touched, making it wrong, off, singed.