The Promise of Paradise
Read The Promise of Paradise Online
Authors: Allie Boniface
The Promise of Paradise
by
Allie
Boniface
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead,
business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely
coincidental.
The Promise of
Paradise
COPYRIGHT © 2013
by Allie Boniface
All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission of the author. Note:
this book was previously released as
Lost in Paradise
with The
Wild Rose Press (publication date 2007). Changes in scene and
character accompany this re-released version.
Cover Art by Renee
Rocco
Visit the author at
www.allieboniface.com
Contact the author
at
[email protected]
Published in the
United States of America
TABLE OF CONTENTS
For
all my writing friends, who've supported me through thick and thin in
this unpredictable business of story-telling. Follow your dreams,
believe that you can, and never stop re-inventing yourselves!
“Is this it?” Jen
craned her neck and stared at the street sign.
Ashton wiped one damp
palm on her thigh and tried to will away the knots in her stomach. “I
don’t know.” She pulled her Volkswagen to the curb and dug in her
pocket for the email print-out with directions. “Next right after
the town green.” She looked across the street. Don’s Convenience
Store waved a limp awning in the afternoon heat. “Across from
Don's. Yeah, this is it. It’s gotta be.”
Already out of the car,
Jen walked to the corner. Pulling her platinum blonde hair into a
ponytail, she checked the crooked street sign and nodded at her best
friend.
Ash made the turn and
parked. “First house on the right,” she read aloud. “Number
two.”
She leaned her forehead
against the steering wheel and closed her eyes. Deciding not to take
the job at Deacon and Mathers was one thing. Moving to an unknown
town a hundred miles from her parents, fleeing the scandal that now
appeared in every Boston newspaper, was something else altogether.
The knots in her stomach multiplied and stretched fingers of steel
that began to strangle her heart.
“Ash?” Jen poked
her through the open window. “You okay?”
She raised her head and
forced herself to take a deep breath. “I don’t know.”
Jen pulled open the car
door. “Come on. Let’s look at the place.”
Shoving dark blonde
curls from her forehead, Ash got out of the car and stopped. “What
if I’ve made a mistake? Like the biggest possible mistake in the
world?” She stared up at the house, a nondescript two-story with
dusty windows. It didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen
before.
Well, that’s the point, right? I wanted something
completely different. I wanted to start fresh, someplace where no one
knew me.
Willing her feet to
step one in front of the other, she followed Jen to the front porch.
“What if I’m really supposed to open my own law practice, go into
politics, like Jess and Anne? Like Dad?” She sank onto the bottom
porch step.
Jen tried the door.
“You’re not,” she said over her shoulder.
“How do you know?”
“Because you spent
the last two months of law school miserable and because you need a
change.”
“My parents are going
to kill me.”
Jen joined her on the
step. “To tell you the truth, I think your parents have other
things on their minds these days.”
Like explaining to
the press why my father was caught with drugs and a nineteen-year-old
prostitute in his car? Two months before he was about to receive the
Democratic vice-presidential nomination?
Ash dug her toe into the
pavement, tracing cracks and watching ants scurry. “I guess you’re
right.” Suddenly, her decision to leave Boston and the center of
the Kirk family scandal didn’t seem like the worst decision in the
world. In fact, when she thought about it, it seemed downright
practical.
She eyed the car and
wondered how long it would take her to unpack. Not that long. The
apartment was supposed to be furnished, and she’d brought only a
few clothes and books. Most of the memories she’d put into storage
or burned.
Jen worked her
fingernail beneath some peeling paint on the porch railing. “You
need this, Ash, a summer to yourself. You need to be…” She
stopped for a moment, as if searching for the right word. “…away.”
“Away from the media
circus? Or away from Colin?”
Jen didn’t answer,
and for just a moment, Ash let herself ache with the memory of Colin
Parker, her love all through law school. She’d planned to accompany
him to Europe and then move in with him at the end of the summer.
Hell, she’d planned on marrying him. But Colin had dumped Ash
thirty-seven days earlier with a note tucked into her planner.
I need some time and
space to think…
it began and ended with his scrawled signature
minus
Love
or any other word that suggested he’d shared her
bed and her heart for the last three years.
One month before
graduation, and three weeks after the debacle with her father, he’d
dumped her. A tear snuck its way down her cheek, and Ash dropped her
head to hide it. The breakup hadn’t been the worst of it. Colin
hadn’t needed time. He’d lied about that part. He
had
needed space, though, space in which to date Callie Halliway,
president of the Student Activities Council and Colin’s co-author
on a half-dozen journal articles. Beautiful and well-pedigreed,
Callie partnered him perfectly, both on his arm and his resume. Ash
had been replaced just like that, one day there and the next day
gone, as if she’d never even existed in Colin’s life.
Jen elbowed her. “Take
a look at this.”
With effort, Ash raised
her head. Emerging from the cornflower blue house across the street
was a short, stocky woman. White hair sprang out from her head in
every direction, and she wore bright yellow gardening gloves. Without
slowing, she marched down her walk and across the street. Up their
crooked pavement she came, until she stopped in front of them. Though
barely five feet tall, she towered over Ash and Jen sitting on the
step, and Ash felt suddenly as if she were back in second grade, with
an angry Miss Howard staring at her across a cluttered room. A frown
carved the woman’s wrinkled face into disapproving lines, and beady
brown eyes examined them. Ash wasn’t sure whether to laugh or run
and hide.
The woman propped both
hands on her hips and said nothing. Jen stood, and Ash followed. “Hi
there. I’m Asht-Ashley Kirtland.” She corrected herself, changing
her name at the last minute. With the Kirk name splashed across every
paper in the Northeast, she didn't need anyone connecting her to it.
The woman nodded.
“Helen Parker.” She pointed across the street. “Lived there for
thirty-two years, this spring. I take care of this place and the one
next door. You have any problems, come see me.” She paused and
massaged one temple with a gnarled hand. “Up the block there, in
the white house near the end, live the MacGregors. Hiram drinks too
much, but his wife Sadie’s a doll, so no one says too much about
it. He’s harmless, anyway.”
Ash slid a glance
toward Jen. No secrets here. That didn’t bode well.
“Two houses down from
that is Lanie Johnson’s. Used to be a Rockette, or some such thing,
‘til she busted her hip and ended up back here in Paradise. Had a
man at one point, a while back, but he ran off two or three years
ago.”
Helen paused to draw a
breath. White flecks of spittle marked the edges of her mouth. “The
rest of these homes are rentals, mostly to college kids during the
year.” She narrowed her eyes, and Ash read the woman’s message
loud and clear.
“I just graduated,”
she explained, leaving off the bit about Harvard and law school. “I’m
subletting for the next three months.”
Helen’s mouth relaxed
a fraction. “Well, the other places are empty now.” Her gaze
moved from the girls to the door behind them. “You’re the only
ones living here this summer, far as I know.”
“Really?”
Loneliness dropped a curtain over Ash’s hopes of finding new
friends. Well, solitude was probably better if she hoped to figure
out what direction her life was supposed to take now.
Helen reached into her
front pocket and pulled out a key ring. Dangling it from two fingers,
as if it were a dirty tissue, she held it out. “Square one’s for
the front door. Smaller one’s for your door upstairs. And the
silver one opens your mailbox.” She glanced at the solitary car by
the curb. “Where’s the other one?”
Ash looked up from the
keys, confused at the question. “I’m sorry?”
Helen puffed out a long
breath of air. “The other
tenant
.” She rubbed her forehead
with one hand, as if trying to pull the name from memory. “Edward
something. Your downstairs housemate.”
“I have a housemate?”
Ash looked at Jen, who grinned.
Helen had already
headed down the front walk, but at the question, she turned back. “Of
course. I thought you’d be arriving together.” She eyed the porch
for a moment, and Ash read the look in her watery blue eyes:
You
better behave.
She stifled a laugh.
“Thank you, Helen. Nice meeting you.”
The woman turned
without replying and shuffled across the street, where she vanished
beyond the sunflowers cloaking her front door.
“Cool. A housemate,”
Jen said. “A
male
housemate.”
“Just what I need,”
Ash said as she tried the key in the door. “Come on. We’ve got
stuff to unpack.”
“I wonder what he
looks like,” Jen said as they pulled sheets and pillowcases from a
cardboard box.
“He’s probably
seventy-five years old, newly widowed, and blind in one eye.” Ash
stood on the bed and stretched to hang a curtain over the back
window.
Jen collapsed onto
paisley-patterned pillows. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Find the worst in
everything. He could be young and single, you know. Why not?”
Ash sat too. “Because
if he’s really young and single, why would he be living here?”
Jen turned to Ash, lips
still but eyes sending the message.
“Yeah, I know.” Ash
shrugged. “But I’m a special case. A nut case. I’m sure most
people in this town aren’t from screwed up families like I am.”
“You never know.”
Jen bounced off the bed and changed the subject. “Hey, let’s
check out the porch roof. That’s the best part about this place. I
saw it online, in the pictures. Come on.”
Ash followed Jen into
the kitchen and leaned against the refrigerator. “It’s probably
unsafe.”
Her friend tugged at
the oversized window beside the sink. “It’s not unsafe. If it
was, they couldn’t rent the house.” The window pulled free, and
in another minute she had climbed through onto the second-floor
rooftop that stretched across the front of the house.
“Be careful.” Ash
edged closer and peeked outside.
“Oh, please. Stop
being such a worrier. It’s safe.” Jen walked the perimeter of the
roof and peered over to the street below. “This railing is brand
new. Look.” She turned at Ash’s silence. “Get your ass out here
right now and look at this view.”
Ash propped her elbows
on the sill and shook her head. “I’m afraid of heights.”
“Not anymore you’re
not. Not with this roof.” Jen slid to a seat and crossed her legs.
“You could have one heck of a party out here.”
Ash stayed where she
was. She wasn’t really afraid of heights. She was more afraid of
not knowing what lay out there, of the too-wide sky that stung her
eyes with its brightness and threatened to swallow her up. Right this
moment, she didn’t feel like taking new steps anywhere, not even
ten feet outside her kitchen window.