Keepsake Read Free Page A

staying at any motel. You'll take me home and stay at my house while you're in Keepsake."
    He protested, but she wouldn't hear of it, and soon it was settled. He would stay in her overly large and virtually unoccupied Victorian home for the duration, whatever it ended up being. Quinn liked the idea of having daily access to someone who could fill him in on seventeen years of comings and goings in Keepsake. He tried to insist on paying for his stay, but Mrs. Dewsbury wouldn't hear of that, either. They ended with a compromise: he would do a few odd jobs around the house, and they would call it even.
    After giving the driver of th e senior citizens' van a heads- up, they left Town Hill together to scandalized looks and some sly greetings, although no one approached them to chat. Caught up in conversation with Mrs. Dewsbury, Quinn had little opportunity to look around him, but the one time he did, he saw a man whose face he could hardly forget: his father's employer and the richest man for miles around, Owen Randall Bennett. The textile mill owner was deep in conversation with two other men and didn't notice—or pretended not to notice—Quinn, who instinctively altered course away from him. He wasn't ready to deal with the town's patriarch yet, not by a long shot.
    "That way's closer to the car," he said to Mrs. Dewsbury, pointing off in another direction. As they shifted course, he found himself wondering where the rest of the Bennetts were. Owen was around. Was his wife? What about their two kids? Had Princess Olivia married and moved on? And her brother, the Prince? Knowing Rand as well as he did, Quinn guessed that he'd been given an empty title and a corner office by his father.
    But it was Rand 's twin sister Olivia who came more vividly to mind. Skinny, brainy, infuriatingly competitive—Quinn and the Princess had butted heads over every academic award the school had offered. He half expected her to tap him on his shoulder and challenge him then and there to a spelling bee.
    Olivia Bennett. He'd never forgotten her. How could he, when they'd grown up side by side on the same estate, she in the big house, he in the gardener's cottage?
    He drove Mrs. Dewsbury home with extra caution—the last thing he needed was to smash up a kindly old widow who'd taken pity on him—and then he hovered solicitously as she plowed in her fur-topped galoshes behind the walker through several inches of unshoveled snow on the walk.
    Her all-white Queen Anne house was enormous; he was surprised she still lived in it by herself. But her grandparents had built it, and four successive generations had lived in it. It wasn't easy to abandon so much history. The trouble was, her son was settled in a lucrative career as a financial planner in Boston , and her divorced and childless daughter lived out west. Mrs. Dewsbury had dreams—but no real hopes—that after she was gone, one of them would somehow return to live in the family homestead.
    "In the meantime," she said, handing Quinn her walker and brushing snow from the banister as she ascended the ambling, wraparound porch, "my daughter wants me to move to a retirement community nearer to where she lives. But I'd be miserable living somewhere else. I wouldn't know a soul and the food would taste different. No, the only way I'm leaving this house is feet first."
    She pointed to an exterior light fixture hanging by its tattered fabric cord from the porch ceiling. "One thing you might do for me, dear, is tuck that thing back into its hole sometime. I got on a stepladder the other day, but I was still too short."
    Aghast at the thought of her teetering on a ladder in her new knees and poking at a frayed cord, Quinn assured her that the job was as good as done.
    They went inside to a house that was cavernous and yet cozy in a varnished, dark-wood way. The ceilings were easily ten feet high, but the arched doorways somehow whittled the rooms back down to size. God knew, there were enough of them: twin