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  DISCOVER THE UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS, DELICIOUS SURPRISES, AND SATISFYING PASSION IN THE WONDERFUL STORYTELLING OF LINDA BARLOW AND HER PREVIOUS NOVEL, HER SISTER’S KEEPER

  “Superb… a tale of passion, love, heartache, and the strength of the human spirit… with skill and finesse, Linda Barlow exposes every nerve, explores every relationship while telling an immensely good story.”

  —Sandra Brown, author of Where There’s Smoke and French Silk

  “There is much to enjoy as relationships shift and change and characters come to grips with personal conflict and finally with WWI, which shakes their way of life to its foundation.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An emotionally powerful and beautifully evocative story of passion, dreams, romance, and courage. A true tour de force”

  —Katherine Stone, author of Rainbows and Promises

  “A turn-of-the-century saga… filled with charming, dynamic characters who live and breathe in the reader’s mind. You will laugh and cry through the adventures and intrigue that keep the pages turning. Words cannot do justice to the incredible writing that permeates the book from start to finish.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “A fantastic tale of passion, revenge, heartbreak, and courage, love betrayed and love sustained. Excellent reading.”

  —Rendezvous

  ALSO BY LINDA BARLOW

  HER SISTER’S KEEPER

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

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  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1994 by Linda Barlow

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56863-0

  For Shirley, my sister

  With love

  Author’s Note

  A sincere thank-you for information, assistance, and support during the writing of this novel goes to Steve Axelrod, Jeanne Tiedge, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Charles Clifford, and all the folks on the Prodigy Alternative Lifestyles bulletin board.

  And my very special thanks to Curt Monash, whose ideas, enthusiasm, and encouragement throughout this project have been invaluable to me.

  Prologue

  Cape Cod, 1963

  Well, hot damn, thought April, not again.

  She hockey-stopped her bike just outside the range of the cloud that was billowing out from the back door of the cottage. The dust danced and glinted in the light from the setting sun as Rina wielded an industrial-strength broom. A glance at the full garbage cans and the clean laundry blowing on the line confirmed what April had already guessed: her mother had a new lover.

  Other women celebrated such occasions by fussing with their nails and makeup and hair, but Rina ignored her appearance—which didn’t need much maintenance—to perform a face lift on the cottage. She washed the road-grimed windows and vacuumed the sorry excuse for a carpet that was glued to the floor. Bright new curtains, whipped up on Rina’s portable sewing machine, replaced the sun-faded ones of the cottage’s narrow windows.

  April figured the new curtains went up on the average of three times a year. The windows they went up on changed almost as often as the curtains. Rina believed in moving around a lot.

  But this was already the second set here at Sea Breeze Housekeeping Villas in Brewster, MA, the summer place where they’d been living for a little over a month. This year her mother must be going for some kind of record.

  Grabbing her worn baseball glove from the basket, April mounted the steps and entered, one hand covering her nose and mouth.

  “I had a game,” she said, taking the most direct, belligerent approach. “You said you’d come.”

  Rina Flaherty, clad in a man’s shirt with the tails drawn up and knotted around her slender waist and only panties, a garter belt and hose underneath it, gave her broom one final sweep. April leapt out of the way. Rina tucked a long strand of pure gold hair that had escaped its high ponytail back behind her ear. Her hair was natural blonde and, loose, fell to the end of her spine. Combined with her bachelor-button blue eyes, her delicate nose, her pink, up-curved mouth, and the overall gracefulness of her petite body, Rina looked like an angel.

  April was convinced she was going straight to hell.

  “I said I’d try to come,” Rina said. Her voice, unlike the rest of her, was not delicate at all. It was low, almost like a man’s, and devoid of inflection. A voice to which commanding came more easily than submission. “As it turned out, I couldn’t. I’m sorry you’re disappointed.”

  “You always disappoint me.” April knew her own voice sounded weak and mushy but she couldn’t seem to help it.

  “People who expect too much are frequently disappointed,” her mother said. “You should learn to rely more on yourself.”

  “It was a good game. We won. Alice St. Claire’s father was there. Remember him? The divorced guy you said looks like Little Joe Cartwright? He asked about you.” April could hear the pleading note in her voice and hated that even more.

  If there has to be a man, she thought, can’t he ever be a nice man? A single man? Someone who’ll love you and marry you and maybe even love me a little as well? Someone who’ll stick around for a while and buy us a real house and real furniture and make enough money so we won’t have to pack up the cottage again in the dark and hit the interstate before the bill collectors catch us? Someone who’ll live with us and make us into a real family?

  “I’m not interested in Alice St. Claire’s father,” Rina said. “Nor am I interested in your attempts to matchmake for me. I’m quite capable of managing such matters on my own.”

  April glared at the sparkling inside of the cottage. “Who is he this time? The chief of police? The mayor, maybe?” Did Brewster, Massachusetts have a mayor? Her mother had a saying, “Always mate with the top dog.” She stuck to it religiously. Trouble was, the top dog was usually married.

  “You’ve been doing real well this year,” she added. “Last year in Texas the highest you could snag was county dog-catcher.”

  One of Rina’s delicate hands flashed toward April’s face, stopping just an inch away. She flinched anyway, then flushed red as her old Radio Flyer. This was a new trick of her mother’s—pretending to slap her and pulling it back at the last second. The sudden movement invariably left April feeling like a mealy mouthed coward for flinching when no blow was struck.

  Rina smiled. “I’ve told you before, you can say whatever you like around other people, but you’ll damn well control your mouth with me. I won’t tolerate your insolence. Now sit down and eat your supper.”

  April eyed the peanut butter and banana sandwich, canned potato sticks, and a bottle of Coke that her mother had laid out in the tiny kitchenette area of the cottage. Rina cleaned and sewed, but she didn’t cook. “I hope you’re not going to make me sleep out in the tent tonight,” she said. “I hate it. There are bugs.”

  “You collect bugs.”

  “Once I saw a snake trying to get into the tent. I’m not too crazy about snakes, even if I did have one as a pet that summer we were in Georgia. One could crawl into my sleeping bag and slither up my leg and bite me like Cleopatra’s asp. Then I’d scream and sweat and my tongue would stick out and I’d thrash all over the place and turn blue and die. Just imagine how sorry you’d be in the morning when you found my poor dead body.”

  “There are no poisonous snakes in Massachusetts,�
� Rina said.

  “Well, there are wild animals.”

  “On Cape Cod? The only animals around here are cats and dogs.”

  “Vicious cats. Haven’t you seen their sharp teeth and claws? And the dogs that hang around the cottage park are lean and mean and—and violent. I’ll bet some of them even have rabies. Just suppose I was laying under there—”

  “Lying under there.”

  “Lying under there and patting one and suddenly he turns on me, all fierce and foaming like Old Yeller after the rabid wolf got him?”

  Rina sighed. “Where’d I ever get such a melodramatic kid?” She pushed her own sandwich aside and lighted a cigarette. April noticed that she had repainted her nails from crimson to a more sedate shade of pink. “You read too many books. They’re rotting your common sense.”

  April bit her lip. She was proud of all the books she read. Her teachers said she was a great reader—way above fifth grade level. Books took her away into a better world. She loved books.

  “How many times have I told you that a woman’s got to control her imagination?” her mother went on. “Particularly when it makes her afraid. You can’t be afraid, April. The minute you show any fear, they get you.”

  April knew better than to ask who “they” were. There was never a clear answer. Her mother had been drumming this into her head for as long as she could remember.

  “Anyway, you don’t have to sleep in the tent. Fact is, despite your speculations, I’m not seeing anybody new, so stop that self-righteous sulking you do so well. God only knows how I ended up with such a morally upright child. Wait until your tits sprout, then you’ll change your tune.”

  April kicked at the table leg. Her mother was immoral and she didn’t even care. It was disgusting.

  Anyway, Rina was lying. There was a new man. There had to be. The broom-and-curtain test had never failed before.

  She had a new lover and she refused to admit it.

  He must be married. Or important. Or both.

  For the next few days April watched her mother’s every move, even following her to her waitress job at the Captain Chapin’s Cape Cuisine, and hiding out in the bushes to make sure she wasn’t meeting some swank summer vacationer, but she turned up nothing. She was just beginning to think she’d been wrong about the new boyfriend when, early one morning, the limousine pulled into the gravel driveway of Sea Breeze Housekeeping Villas.

  It was sleek and black and the windows were tinted so you couldn’t see inside. Two men in suits and hats—one big and broad and the other shorter and trimmer—got out and climbed the rickety steps to the front door of the cottage. April was pumping up her bicycle tires in the shade of the cottage. If the men saw her, they paid no attention.

  As he knocked, the tails of his jacket pulled tight over the larger man’s back, and April saw the outline of a concealed weapon. Holy Halloween. Gangsters.

  “No!” she cried, knocking over her bike as she erupted from her shady corner. She ran straight at the men, yelling at her mother not to open the door. “He has a gun, Rina! He’s here to kill you!”

  The leaner of the men caught her. He turned his face aside from her flailing fingernails. “Calm down, son,” he said.

  She scored big with her teeth on the wrist. He let her go, yelping. “I’m a girl, you creep!” she shouted. “Rina!”

  Her mother opened the door. She was dressed conservatively for once, in a light-weight gray suit with a knee-length skirt and a pale blue blouse. Her hair was subdued into a French braid, and her makeup was light. “Stop your noise,” she ordered her daughter. “Did you bite that man? Really, April, your behavior is disgraceful.”

  “Mom! They’re gangsters! The big one has a gun.”

  “We work for the United States government, Miss,” the big one said politely, adjusting the rear of his jacket. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re here to protect you.”

  Oh, sure, thought April. U.S.… government agents didn’t drive around in flashy limousines. Everybody knew they used unmarked Chevys or Fords.

  The man with the gun turned to Rina. “Are you about ready, Mrs. Flaherty?”

  “I’ll be with you in a moment, gentlemen.” Rina’s voice was calm but her eyes were very bright. “I just wish you’d given me more notice.”

  “We didn’t expect him, ma’am.”

  “Not on his schedule, you see, ma’am,” the slim man said. He was rubbing his hand and glaring at April.

  “Well, I’d hardly be listed on his official appointment calendar, would I?” Rina said with a laugh.

  “No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. I just meant—”

  “We don’t like it any better than you do, Mrs. Flaherty. The security arrangements are problematic when the notice is so short.”

  “Rina,” April interrupted. “Who are these guys?”

  “Come inside, April.”

  April squeezed past the Mob enforcers, or whatever they were. “You look funny in that suit,” she said to her mother. “You look like you’re going to Mass.”

  Rina laughed. She closed the door and led her daughter into the kitchenette area. “I’m going out for a few hours. Stay in and do your homework.”

  “It’s summer. I don’t have homework.”

  “Then clean up this cottage. It’s a pigsty.”

  “You’ve been scrubbing it all week!”

  “April—”

  “I know you’re going to meet your lover. He must be rich and important. But I still say those men are gangsters. They’ve got guns, Mom, huge ones. And that limo—that’s disgusting. What is he, a Mafia chieftain?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” Rina said. “He’s the regional capo and a very powerful man. He hates ill-natured children and has methods of disciplining them that would make your blood run cold, so he’d better not receive any bad reports about you from his men. Understand?” Casting a quick look in the mirror that was pasted onto the front of the refrigerator, she adjusted a strand of golden hair and pursed her lips to check the line of her lipstick. Then she nodded. “Well, I’m off. Behave yourself.”

  April watched through the new curtains as Rina walked serenely between the two gunmen to the black limousine. God! Her mother had really done it this time.

  She ran out the back door and swung herself onto her bike. She knew a shortcut to the main road. She couldn’t hope to keep up, but maybe she’d be able to see which direction they were headed.

  But the limo never reached the main road. Doubling back, April found its tire tracks in the sandy dirt leading down to the private drive that wound along the ocean. The fresh trail was easy to follow. It ran for just over a mile to an isolated house set on a low bluff overlooking Cape Cod Bay.

  April abandoned her bike and crept closer on foot. She hadn’t really believed what Rina had said about the gangster’s methods of discipline, but she didn’t want to take any chances.

  Not one, but three black limousines were parked outside the house. Around the perimeter were several guards wearing suits and cradling high-powered rifles. “Mary, Joseph, and Baby J,” April whispered. “It’s an armed camp.”

  Also present was a Hyannis patrol car. Crouched in the tall dune grasses, April clearly saw the big man in the suit who had come for her mother—now equipped with a walkie-talkie—shaking hands with a smiling local policeman.

  God! This must be a super-powerful criminal. He’d corrupted the Hyannis police.

  “Mommy, they’re going to kill you,” she whispered. “They’ll have to. You know too much.”

  The door to the cottage opened and out came her mother with a pitcher of lemonade and a tray of glasses. There was no sign of her crime-boss lover. Rina was still dressed exactly as she had been before.

  What was she doing here? Waitressing?

  The men gathered around, drinking the lemonade and glancing at their watches. Then they all looked skyward as they heard the familiar whop-whop-whop of a helicopter. April craned her neck. Over a curve in the coastlin
e came a small military chopper. Military?

  It set down on the dry shingled beach to the right of the cottage. Three hard-jawed suits emerged first and fanned out, securing the location with swift, professional movements.

  April’s heart was thundering. It was all coming together in her head. She’d seen men like these before. They weren’t gangsters. She knew them from TV. They all looked the same, tough, professional, nondescript. She’d even seen this helicopter, or one very like it, over on the other side of the Cape at Hyannisport late one Friday afternoon.

  “Holy Mother,” she muttered. “I don’t believe this.”

  Escorted by two of the security men, Rina walked toward the chopper. She looked sensational. She had shed the jacket of her suit, and April could see that in the bright sunlight, the pale blue blouse was almost transparent. Her skirt was demure, but fit her small waist and rounded hips snugly. Her slender legs gleamed in her silken hose, and the wind had loosened her blonde hair just slightly from its French braid.

  A tall man with a full head of hair and a blindingly familiar face stepped down from the helicopter. When he saw Rina, his face lit up with his famous smile. He opened his arms, and she ran into them, raising her angelic face for his kiss.

  April toppled to her knees in the dirt. Always mate with the top dog. Her mother’s lover was the president of the United States.

  Contents

  Also by Linda Barlow

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen