If we stick with round numbers, let’s say GiGi’s mother would have been twenty years older than her, add another twenty years to get GiGi’s grandmother’s age, so the hope chest has to be…” He laughed. “Really old.”
Nati laughed, too, at his failure to come up with a precise number.
“I’d never seen it before,” he went on, “but GiGi made me root around in the attic until I found it this morning. It’s kind of like a wooden steamer trunk. The overall finish has survived pretty well, but the design painted on the front, around the latch, and on the very top has faded nearly into oblivion. GiGi wanted me to ask you if you could redo it the way you redid the mirror frame.”
“I’d have to check it out to know.”
“It’s a leafy vine motif with some hearts and flowers—”
“That’s the kind of thing I do. But I can’t say if the original design is restorable until I see it.”
“There are some spots that are gone altogether,” he warned. “Especially around the latch—”
“Sure, where hands brushed against it over and over again. But if there’s enough of the pattern left in other places I can usually figure out what’s missing and fill it in.”
“You just have to see it first to know,” he repeated. “What about now? If you don’t have anywhere to be, we could go over there and take a look…”
“Oh. Now? To your grandmother’s house?”
“It doesn’t have to be now. We can set it up for later. I just thought that since we’re both free, and you’re already on this side of town, and GiGi’s place is just over on Gaylord—”
Saturday night and he was as free as she was? He didn’t have a party or an event or a date with some drop-dead-gorgeous socialite? That was hard to believe.
“Sure, I can do that,” she answered after a pause.
“We can take my car or you can follow me over and go home from there—your choice,” he offered.
The thought of riding in a car with him seemed a little awkward and at the same time too appealing, so she said, “I’ll just follow you in my car.”
“Okay. Then if you’re all finished here, why don’t we go? We might be just in time for you to meet GiGi before she leaves for her dinner plans.”
GiGi. Every time he said it there was affection in his tone. Georgianna Milner Camden. Nati’s grandfather’s old love.
Nati’s curiosity suddenly ran high.
“Okay,” she agreed, worrying all over again that this whole thing might smack of disloyalty in some way. But she couldn’t stop herself now.
Cade ushered her out the front door and back to her car. It was parked beside his in the driveway.
“Just follow me,” he suggested.
“Okay,” Nati agreed, hoping her old clunker could keep up with his sleek black sports car.
As they drove the short distance, Nati saw him repeatedly glance into his rearview mirror to make sure she was there. But he drove conservatively enough for her not to have any problem following him.
After a few minutes, Cade turned onto a driveway that ran through the gap in a ruddy redbrick wall bordering an enormous estate.
She followed him up the stone-paved drive and around the fountain that formed the centerpiece of the front grounds. They came to a stop near a five-car garage. It was attached to an expansive house that would have made her former in-laws drool with envy because it dwarfed theirs.
The Tudor mansion curved out from the garage in a two-story semicircle of brick, stucco, wood trim and arched windows. The classically steep roof was dotted with dormers, two sculpted brick chimneys and gables under which thick green ivy grew.
Nati was embarrassed by the sound her car made when she turned off the engine but she pretended not to be when she got out.
“This is beautiful,” she said with unveiled awe as Cade led the way up the three steps onto the wide curved landing that stretched out from the house’s entrance.
Cade didn’t knock on the huge single door with its stained and leaded glass in the upper half. He merely opened it, held it and motioned for Nati to go in ahead of him.
She did, stepping as gingerly as if she were walking on eggshells, into an enormous foyer with a vaulted ceiling and a crystal chandelier centered over a round entry table large enough for a family of six to eat around had it been a dining table.
Cade followed her in, closed the door and shouted, “GiGi? Are you still here?”
“In the den,” a voice from somewhere farther into the house shouted back.
Having been married to the heir to an airline fortune, Nati had had the occasion to see some pretty impressive places. But nothing had compared to what she saw as she followed Cade to the left of the foyer, through double doors and into an oak-paneled den where two women were standing at a curio, one of them dusting antique watches, and then handing them to the other woman who carefully placed them on display.
Nati judged the woman replenishing the display to be about sixty years old—too young to be Cade’s grandmother. She was short, plump, with rosy round cheeks. She was dressed casually in knit slacks and a sweatshirt, her ash-blond hair cut close to her head all over in a low-maintenance cap style.
The other woman was older—more the age of Nati’s seventy-five-year-old grandfather and more likely to be the matriarch of the Camden clan. Like the sweat-shirted woman, she was also not much more than five feet tall and had a somewhat fluffy figure that said she enjoyed her food and robust good health, too. She was the more attractive of the two women, with a lined face that still bore the signs of glowing beauty. Her hair was salt-and-pepper colored, and she wore it short and curly. And despite the fact that she was dressed in a stylish black evening suit with a lacy white blouse and several strands of pearls, she was doing the dusting.
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