Alice At Heart by Deborah Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

Southern socialites are notorious for lying about their ages—gilding the magnolia—so to speak. But none ever claim they are thirty years older than common sense says is possible.
    Remain polite about their delusions , I told myself, staring at the floor to hide my alarm. And just play along until you can escape . “I see.”
    Lilith watched me closely. “No, you don’t. We don’t live by the rules of ordinary people. You know that in your heart. You know anything I tell you may be possible. Look at me, Alice. Please.”
    I raised my eyes to hers. Her expression softened. “Study our eyes. Gray-green, like the sea. Just like yours. An extraordinary color. Unique to our kind. To our family. Mara. Pearl. Look at her eyes. Let us all look straight into Alice’s eyes. And Alice, you look at us .” She paused. “All four of us standing here today are linked by the most amazing destiny. We have our father’s eyes.”
    In the deepening silence between words, the pauses of reflection and emotion, the acidic wash of stark scrutiny and shock, in those spaces where the truth lives, I knew, I felt, I saw. But I shook my head.
    Lilith Bonavendier immediately swept toward me with a knowing gleam in those amazing eyes—eyes I had seen in my own mirror. “ Alice . Your father’s name was Orion. Orion Bonavendier. Our mother, the love of his life, had died not many years before he met your mother. He was still grieving, distraught—dying of a broken heart. Nothing could stop that.”
    Lilith touched my face. “He met your mother when she came to work as a counselor at the children’s camp called Sweetwater Haven, on a brackish river along the mainland, not many miles from our island. This young counselor—your mother—was bright and beautiful, and we all appreciated how she drew our father out of his misery. I can’t say I’m proud he seduced her, but I’m sure he never meant to destroy her, Alice. And I am certain—in the depths of my dreams, in my soul, my instincts, my sisterhood with you—that your mother adored him, and she was only driven to disaster by her family once she returned here.”
    “She drowned herself in the town lake,” I said grimly. “After she saw the web-toed mutant she’d birthed.”
    This cruel assessment made the three women draw themselves up and frown at me. Lilith said with an incredulous tone, “Is that what you’ve grown up believing about your mother and yourself?”
    “It’s the truth.”
    “ No . I have notes your mother wrote to Father. She was in love with him. She wanted to stay with him. She wouldn’t have rejected any child she had with him.”
    “No mother can turn her back on a Bonavendier baby,” Pearl said. “We’re quite alluring, even in the crib.”
    “You were taken away from her, Alice. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. That would have driven her to despair. I expect her family intended to place you for adoption.”
    My thoughts whirled. I felt as if I was struggling just under the surface of shallow water, caught in a vortex. “You’re offering me a convenient rationale, I’m afraid.”
    “I’m offering you the truth. Come with us, Alice. Look at the proof we can show you of your heritage. See where you belong.” She paused, her expression becoming supplicating and sad. “Accept our apologetic and sincere love.”
    Love? I had never known love in my life, and the use of it as a lure from strangers enraged me. “Let me understand this,” I said between gritted teeth. “You’re saying my mother, a very young woman—not even out of her teens quite then—a small-town girl raised in a time and place where morals were very strict and the rules undeniably severe—you’re saying she was willing to give up everything for a summer seduction orchestrated by an eighty-five-year-old grieving widower? And I am supposed to believe she adored him—and wanted to bear his child? Me . And you actually care ?”
    “Yes. Absolutely. Listen to