Someone to Love Read Free

out a paperback that had fallen to the back of the shelves. He was still living in the small apartment that he and Stacy had shared. Her sister, in a rage after the funeral, had gone to the apartment and taken whatever she thought had belonged to Stacy. Jace had returned to an apartment that was cleaned out, almost as though Stacy had never lived there with him.
    When the paperback fell on the floor, he saw that it was the one Stacy had been reading just before they left for England. For a moment, Jace forgot that she was gone and almost called out to her. When it hit him yet again that she was dead, he clutched the book and collapsed onto a chair.
    He looked at the book with its gaudy cover and smiled. He used to tease Stacy that she had “low-class taste” when it came to novels. “I read legal papers most of the time,” she’d said, “so at home I need fun reading. You should try them. They’re great.”
    He got up, meaning to put the book by his bedside, but something fell onto the floor. When he picked up the envelope, his heart nearly stopped. It was postmarked “Margate,” the English village where Stacy had died.
    Inside was the photo of an ugly house and on the back someone had written that he/she would meet Stacy the night before she died. “This is why she wanted to go to England,” he’d said aloud. It wasn’t that she wanted to be with him but that she was meeting another person. Who? Jace wondered. Why? Was it a man?
    For days he thought of nothing but the photo. He memorized the words. “Ours again.” What did that mean? That Stacy had owned the house before? Jace spent sleepless nights going over everything Stacy had told him about her life. Her parents had divorced when she was three. Her mother had moved them to California while her father stayed in New York with his business. When Stacy was sixteen, her mother had died of cancer. One day she had a headache that wouldn’t go away, so she went to a doctor. Six weeks later she was dead. Stacy was sent to live with her father, a man she’d seen only a few times in her life. Stacy used to laugh when she said that at first they “didn’t get along.” She’d meant it as an understatement. She was a teenager and angry that her mother had been taken from her, and angrier still that she was sent to live with her father, who was always working and never had time for her. Stacy said that she managed to be so bad that after a year her father sent her back to California to live with her mother’s sister.
    After Stacy graduated from Berkeley, she and her father finally became friends. But the friendship nearly died a year later when her father married a woman who was deeply jealous of Stacy.
    Jace tried to remember all the places Stacy said she’d been. In the summers while she was in college, she used to go with a group of kids to Europe to “see the sights.” “My hippie days,” Stacy would say, laughing. Was that when she saw the house? Jace wondered. Is that when it was “theirs”?
    He wanted to ask her father questions, but Mr. Evans had said that…Actually, Jace didn’t want to remember what Stacy’s father had said to him on the day of the funeral.
    On impulse, Jace had gone to the Internet and brought up the name of the premier real estate agency in England, then typed in “Margate” for the location. The house was for sale. He recognized the photo as the one in the envelope and was sure that the picture of the house had been cut out of a sales brochure.
    Jace downloaded the brochure for the house and read every word carefully. It was a very old house, part of it built on the remains of a monastery established in the early 1100s. When the Dissolution of the Monasteries was ordered in 1536, the brochure said it had been converted into a “stately manor house.”
    The second Jace saw the house he knew what he had to do. He knew in his heart that the secret to why Stacy had killed herself was inside that house. She had been there