Shadows 02 Girl in the Shadows Read Free Page A

less about her daughter, but the way she shifted those dark gray eyes nervously and tightened her thin fingers around the pearl head of her brown walking stick at the slightest reference to Rhona told me she still suffered sharp pangs in her heart from the great disappointment. She couldn't simply write her off and forget her as she claimed, waving her hand and declaring. "It's as if she never was, far as I'm concerned. Never was."
    Trevor Washington said. "Asking a parent to deny her own child is like asking a flower to deny the rain. Mrs. Westington can pretend all she wants, but it can't happen. Blood's blood. It can't be ignored no matter what you do."
    He whispered this to me after one of Mrs. Westington's tirades about her ungrateful daughter, but I was positive Mrs. Westing - ton had heard him. It didn't take me long to see that she didn't miss much going on around her, despite her age and fragile appearance.
    I was surprised her loyal employee would say anything negative or critical about her to me, but right from the beginning, Trevor was willing to take me into his confidence. Perhaps he was desperate for company, desperate for someone who not only could hear but was willing to listen. After all, he had no family of his own and was working for an elderly lady and a deaf fourteen-year-old girl. Loneliness had found a home in his world. too.
    Mrs. Westington told me about his tragedy. "He lost his young wife to a raging bone cancer that gobbled her up like some monster with metal teeth. That poor beautiful girl withered like one of his grapes on the vine and that tore his heart to shreds. There's a line in the Bible that fits him," she said. " 'If you should die. I will hate all womankind.'
    "That in a nutshell is the story of Trevor Washington. The man married himself to this land and this family with the dedication of a monk. And I'm not flattered by it. I'm saddened by it," she said.
"He has no other family?" I asked.
    "He has some elderly aunts and some cousins, and his mother is still alive."
"She is?"
"She's ninety-three and lives in a nursing home in Phoenix. Arizona. He visits her regularly, but he says she's in that limbo between life and death where she doesn't remember anything, including him and his visits. Of course, he noes anyway."
After Mrs. Westington's husband died or as she says. "kicked the bucket," she closed the vineyard. She knew Trevor had to manufacture most of the work he did, but she would never let him go. The old three-story house was large enough to require him to provide regular maintenance and I knew he had a pet project: fanning a small portion of the once fruitful and vibrant vineyard, and then processing his harvest into Chardonnay wine. I understood that he grew enough grapes to produce 50 to a 150 cases of the Chardonnay that had built the Westingtons" their small fortune. The remainder of the property was overgrown.
Although the house still had its original charm and style, all of the furnishings looked worn and tired. It was truly as if it had aged alongside Mrs. Westington. Frayed sofas, worn rugs, a cracked figurine on a rickety looking pedestal, all of it, like her, nevertheless still had character. Giving anything away or throwing anything out would be like deserting old friends. Right from the moment I set foot in the home. Mrs. Westington would nod at something and tell me its history and why it was still important to her. This was a present; that was something she had bought on a trip East or a vacation. I imagined she recited these anecdotes to anyone who entered so as to justify why someone with her bank account wouldn't replenish, restore, or buy new and more fashionable things.
"Because people today treat their possessions with such disdain, they treat each other likewise," she declared before I could even think of asking such questions. "People who have no respect for what their ancestors left them have no respect for themselves.
You don't get tired of things that had