Rebecca Blaine studied the return address on the certified letter as she pushed open the door to the post office and stepped into the sunny afternoon. Once upon a time, during her ten years of undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral classes, she’d received a generous monthly stipend from that New York address. It had come like clockwork, arriving in her mailbox the first of every month. But she’d finished her doctorate degree two years ago…why in the world would Harold’s lawyers reach out to her again?

Settling into the driver’s seat of her Corolla, she absently started the engine, and cranked on the air conditioning. It was unseasonably warm for June in the Pacific Northwest.

As she stared down at the creamy envelope, a thick weight congealed in her chest. The letter carried bad news, she just knew it. After a deep breath and a long exhale, she turned the envelope over and carefully peeled the flap back, then pulled out two swaths of thick creamy paper. The sheets were folded in thirds. As she unfolded the pages, a check fell from between the pleats. She instinctively caught and scanned it.

Five hundred thousand dollars.

Disbelief struck, drilling into her like a needle full of Novocain. Everything went hazy and numb. She read the amount again, but the combination of letters and numbers didn’t rearrange themselves into a more realistic figure.

Bending her head, she read the first page.

Sorrow swept through her, which was quickly followed by a mixture of anguish, anger and guilt as her mother’s image rose in her mind. She took a deep breath and held it, letting the echo of ancient emotions wash through her. Memories of Harold were intrinsically tied to memories of her mother.

But this sorrow shouldn’t be about her mother; it should be about Harold. The man who’d stepped in to help her when she needed it most, and likely saved her life in the process. While she’d kept in touch with him through Christmas cards and periodic thank you notes, she hadn’t seen him since her mother’s death when she’d moved out of his La Jolla bluff mansion and into her father’s Mission Hills house. Still, Harold’s kindness had made it possible for her to attend college, and graduate school, which had turned her away from the destructive path she’d been on. She owed her psychology practice to his generosity.

He’d been a good man, able to see past her teenage angst to the troubled, grieving girl below.

She dropped the letter from the lawyer onto her lap, where it joined the check, and fumbled open the second piece of creamy paper.

A whiff of minty aftershave drifted up from the letter, blindsiding her. Becca sat perfectly still as the memories unraveled.

Sitting beside Harold on the floor, his spicy cologne a pungent cloak surrounding her…opening the wood drawers…poking and prodding the ornate trim throughout the desk…the rise and fall of delighted laughter when they struck a spring mechanism and a secret compartment creaked open.

The vision shifted and for a moment, her mother’s lilting voice filled the car.

A stainless-steel spoon in hand, her thick, black curls romping against her slender back, Rachel Blaine danced between the huge, eight burner gas stove, and the gemstone counter of the kitchen isle. Her voice rose and fell in a pure Irish cadence…

“Aye, I see the moon and the moon sees me

She be smilin’ through the window on me precious baby

Aye, the moon loves me Becca, as much as me

See her smilin’ on the face of me sleepin’ beauty.”

The recollection spawned quiet sorrow. Her mother had claimed that moonlight was the moon’s way of smiling. Funny how she’d forgotten that through the years.

The memory had barely registered when an ominous shadow usurped the image of her mother’s sparkling eyes and bouncing hair. She stiffened, flinching as the shadow writhed and swayed, a macabre dance in mid-air from the business end of a noose. With a shudder, Becca banished the image.

If was odd how memories worked. How one’s imagination could infuse them with events that hadn’t happened—terrifying images that hadn’t been seen by the human eye, but still buried themselves in the human psyche.

Her mother’s body hadn’t been moving when she’d walked into the foyer. It had been hanging there in mid-air, perfectly still—like a beautiful, life-sized doll. Her long, corkscrew curls had shimmered beneath the chandelier’s glow, her dark eyes had been wide and glossy—empty of life. Her mother hadn’t been struggling or writhing or any of the horrific images that had reeled through Becca’s mind late at night, or infected her dreams so often sleep had become something to fear.

It had taken years to banish the nightmares. She wasn’t about to let them sink their destructive fangs into her again. So, as she’d learned to do in the early days of her recovery, she closed her eyes and concentrated on detaching the negative emotions from the image—on denuding the memory of its teeth. She envisioned a gentle silver rain, a tranquil cleansing that rinsed the wretched emotions away, washing and washing until nothing but serenity remained.

* * *

The desk arrived a week later, delivered to Becca’s doorstep by three young men in T-shirts sporting the logo of National Freight.

“Where would you like it?” one of the deliverymen asked once the bureau was freed from its crate.

“In the living room. I’ve already cleared a spot for it.”

She led the way through her front door, down the short entry hall and around the corner to the living room. After indicating the open space in the corner next to the window, she stepped back so they could wiggle the desk into place. After signing the release form and escorting the two men back to the front entrance, she returned to study the newest addition to her living room.

Up close, the desk looked even smaller than she’d remembered. Not a surprise since she’d only been six or seven when she’d been obsessed with its secret compartments. It was interesting to see it now, through adult eyes. It was quite lovely, with a warm patina and the aura of timelessness emitted by material objects of historical significance.

Its feet were carved like cat’s paws and the front and back legs were clearly the limbs of a cat as well—broadening as they reached the undercarriage of the desk, until they resembled shoulders.

The front of the desk was up and held in place by two yellow straps. After cutting the plastic strips, she eased the front down until the hinges caught. The interior had drawers stacked three high on the right and left, with a double tier of file slots in between. Along the top, above the drawers and file folders, were seven drawers. They were tiny, barely big enough for paperclips, or keys. But if she remembered correctly, that fourth itty-bitty drawer hid the latch that opened the largest of the secret compartments.

Grasping the tarnished knob, she gently pulled the drawer all the way out and set it aside, then eased two fingers inside the small space and pressed up, along the top, inside edge. The wood against her fingertips gave with a soft click, and the file folders dropped forward slightly. Smiling, she pushed the section with the file folders down, revealing the ten-inch compartment behind.

The slanted entrance to the secret compartment was exactly as she remembered. But the russet, leather bound book tucked inside the space was new. Wasn’t that just like Harold? He must have left her the book as a surprise. When he’d been in residence at his La Jolla Farms estate, he’d hid toys or treats in the desk for her. He’d been as close to a grandfather as she’d ever gotten.

She eased the leather-bound book out and turned it over. A blue, tear shaped stone was embedded in the middle of the front cover, encircled by a sphere of stitched leather. Antique clasps of tarnished bronze kept the book closed. It was somewhere around six by eight inches, the leather exterior carved with clusters of what looked like mistletoe. But the cover held no title or author…odd…

Settling cross legged on the carpet, Becca carefully pried the two clasps apart and spread the book open. Familiar, looping writing filled the white sheets of paper—her mother’s handwriting. Her throat tightened. She turned the page. A hummingbird feeder, surrounded by a flock of hummingbirds took life in front of her. The sketch was in pencil, and so detailed and realistic the birds appeared to take flight beneath her hands. Her throat tightened even more and took to aching.

Her mother’s art.

Her mother’s writing.

Her mother’s diary.

Becca sat there frozen, her mother’s words and memories lying heavy in her hands. It felt wrong to turn the pages, to read the words, absorb these memories that weren’t her own. It felt like a violation of privacy. Her mother must have hidden this journal for a reason…

But maybe, just maybe, this diary would provide some answers to the questions that had haunted her for the past decade and a half. Like why? Why had her mother committed suicide, abandoning the child she professed to love? Why had she doomed her child to a hellish existence beneath her lover’s roof?

By taking her own life, her mother had abandoned Becca to that God-awful house, full of those God-awful people. Beyond taking her in, her father certainly hadn’t stepped up to protect her, or bothered to put an end to the vicious pranks pulled by her half-brother, or the constant bad-mouthing by her martyred stepmother.

Was it any surprise she’d latched onto Dante Addario when he’d returned to town? Was it any surprise she’d fallen completely and utterly in love with him? God…she’d been so starved for affection by then. Starved for someone to love, for someone to love her. Desperate for someone to believe her, take her side, help her chart a course through the quicksand she’d been tossed into.

Bitterness rose, but she sighed and gave it wings. If she’d used her brains back then, instead of relying on teenage emotions and hormones, she would have known that the intense interlude with Dante would end badly. He’d been best friends with Adam, her lying, vindictive stepbrother. Not to mention Rosaria, Dante’s beloved grandmother, had been best friends with Lena, her father’s martyr of a wife. Adam’s insidious lies aside, it didn’t take much imagination to guess what horrible things Lena had said about her, which would have filtered through Rosaria and burned into Dante’s subconscious like black, pitchy tar.

She’d never stood a chance with him. Too bad she hadn’t figured that out before he’d turned his back on her and shattered what remained of her heart. With a deep breath, she pulled away from those painful memories. She’d survived a lot during those four, excruciating years between her fourteenth and eighteenth birthdays… but Dante’s abandonment had come close to destroying her.

Flipping back to the beginning of the book, she began leafing through the pages. From the date of the first entry, her mother had started the diary six months before she’d hung herself. Maybe the answers to Becca’s questions were finally at hand.

With each flip of her wrist and rustled page, her mother’s dynamic personality sprang to life. The writing was vibrant, full of descriptions and textures and humor, liberally laced with love. That was the one thing Becca still remembered vividly about her mother—the one thing that hadn’t been grotesquely skewed over the years—how full of love she’d been, how full of life. The writing and sketches emphasized that memory. She could almost hear her mother’s thick Irish brogue whispering from the pages. The brogue that her father’s family had found so abhorrent, at least when it came to the unwelcome, youngest addition to their family.

Sketches and whimsical stories littered the pages, most of them about Becca. Sketches of Becca sleeping, picking flowers, skipping across the marble foyer with a rose bud crown askew atop her head. The entire journal was an illustrated love letter…to her—Rebecca Blaine—from her mother.

She stared at the happiness on her young face, at the loving stroke of her mother’s pencil, at the lilting, lyrical stories and poems and lyrics cascading across the parchment. She hadn’t imagined those early years. Her mother had loved her, well and truly loved her and she’d known it back then. Contentment and happiness radiated from her young face.

But that realization just led to more questions. If her mother had loved her as much as this journal indicated, why had she killed herself? Why abandon her only child in such a cruel fashion? She must have known that Becca would be the one to find her. The one to walk in on her writhing…

She blocked the image from her mind and focused single-mindedly on the pages beneath her fingers, turning and turning until she’d reached the last few entries in the journal. But the diary’s tone never changed. Her mother’s stories and poems didn’t darken. A shadowy stain never spread across the parchment. If anything, her mother’s words sounded more vibrant, full of happiness and hope, certainly not the desperate wretchedness of someone in the throes of deep depression. As she turned the last page a slick square of squiggly black and gray on white film slipped off the page and onto her lap. The grainy image of a small, curled form was clearly visible within the black and white static.

It didn’t surprise her to find her mother had kept an ultrasound print out of when she’d been pregnant with Becca. Rachel Blaine had been unabashedly sentimental.

Letting the ultrasound fall back onto her lap, she shook her head in frustration. Apparently, her questions would remain unanswered. There was nothing between these pages to indicate why her mother had killed herself.

The final page, dated the morning of her mother’s death was just a sketch, although it had been painstakingly rendered. If someone was contemplating suicide, why would they bother to capture the image of a necklace with such loving detail? So strange. Her mother hadn’t even been interested in jewelry. She’d been just as happy wearing a chain of daisies as a chain of diamonds.

Although…the necklace in the sketch was quite lovely. On a lacey bed of webbed filaments floated a multi-faceted, octagon shaped stone. Since the drawing was in pencil, she couldn’t tell the color of the centerpiece, but it looked like a gemstone of some sort. And its backing, well that looked almost like a miniature dreamcatcher what with the delicate, laced netting.

Her mother had collected dream catchers. Had the design been her own? It certainly looked like something she would have created. Becca ran a finger down the sketch. It wouldn’t be difficult to bring the necklace to life. She could take the sketch to a jeweler and have them create the pendant using a sapphire. Her mother’s favorite color had been blue.

With one last look at the drawing, she closed the diary. Wouldn’t you know it? Invading her mother’s privacy had just led to more questions. Picking the ultrasound up, she started to slip it into the diary when the time/date stamp along the top right edge caught her eye. She froze. The film was time stamped 10:30 AM…the morning of her mother’s death.

Which meant this ultrasound wasn’t a keep sake of her mother’s pregnancy with Becca.

Her hands suddenly icy, she turned the square over and found a name scrawled in blue ink across the back.

Aaron Robert.

Aaron had been Becca’s father’s name. Robert had been her mother’s father’s name. The cold in her hands spread up her arms and into her chest.

Aaron Robert…

Her mother had been pregnant. Becca had had a baby brother on the way.

She sat there, her chest tight and aching, as grim conviction hardened inside her.

Her mother had been pregnant the morning of her death.

Pregnant.

Which meant there was no way…absolutely no way, her death had been a suicide.