the storage shed to park her car, if she didn’t ever need to open the passenger-side door.
She wiggled out of the Jeep and brushed at the front of her slacks. The fiberglass had made her itchy, not to put too fine a point on it. She wanted a hot shower and a change of clothes. She tugged her overnight bag out of the car and headed toward the kitchen entrance. There was an outside stairway leading to the family quarters on the second floor but she didn’t have a key to the door at the top, so the back stairs through the kitchen was her only option. She just hoped the White Pine’s longtime head cook, Margaret McElroy—Mac to everyone who knew her—would be too busy to question Callie on her unexpected arrival and bedraggled appearance.
She was in luck. As Callie entered, Mac, pushing sixty, wiry-haired, and as short and round as a fireplug, was haranguing her staff of college students and long-suffering grill cooks like the army drill sergeant she used to be. The high, screened windows, although open to the cooling evening breeze, did little to dispel the heat and humidity in the too-small room. The dishwasher was rumbling away, fire flared in the grill, and the smell of seared beef and hot grease caused Callie’s stomach to rumble. She hadn’t eaten since she left Ann Arbor and she suddenly realized just how hungry she was. The White Pine served great steaks, but what the restaurant was really famous for was the all-you-could-eat perch and bluegill dinners.
She’d return to the kitchen for some of each as soon as she was clean and dry. She grabbed her duffel, holding it to her chest, and hurried up the steep, narrow stairs. In the days when the building was a hotel, the stairs would have been used by the maids to carry hot water to the patrons in the rooms above. Nowadays it led to a door that opened into the family kitchen she and her dad had seldom used. She hesitated for a moment before the closed door. Should she knock? After all, it really wasn’t her home anymore. It was her father’s—and Ginger’s. She was only a guest. She settled on a quick, light tap, the kind of combined warning and greeting you’d give anyone before you opened a closed door in a house. No response. She opened the door. The kitchen was empty. The light was on, since it was now almost nine and the windows faced away from the lake into the lower branches of the pines and maples on the hillside. Ginger hadn’t gotten around to changing much in the small, functional room beyond painting the old pine cabinets a creamy white and adding a colorful valance above the utilitarian white blinds on the windows. Although the changes were minimal, Callie had to admit the room was a lot more inviting than it had been in the past.
“Hello, anybody home?” Callie called out. She didn’t really expect her dad or her stepmother to be here. They would be downstairs, her stepmother overseeing the dining-room operation and her dad behind the bar, where he still helped out during busy weekend evenings. But her stepsiblings might be hanging around. “Brandon? Becca?”
Silence. Maybe the twins were busing tables. She’d been younger than they were when she’d started busing, under the less than enthusiastic supervision of her mother. Free-spirited and fun-loving, Karen Layman hadn’t wanted to work in the grill when her in-laws retired to Arizona, but business hadn’t been good enough to warrant the expense of another full-time employee. So Callie’s mother had reluctantly filled the role of manager until the long hours, tight money and long, cold winters she hated had drained all the joy from her life and her marriage.
At least, that was what she’d told Callie when she’d taken off to rethink her priorities three weeks after Callie’s sixteenth birthday. From then on it had been just Callie and her dad...at least until a little over a year ago when Ginger Markwood had come into the White Pine inquiring about a job. She’d found not only employment but a place in J.R.’s heart. Now she was his wife, and her two children—three, soon—called Callie’s old home their own. The realization was more disturbing than she cared to admit.
“Hey, kids? Anyone here?” Callie called out again, moving from the kitchen into the big, high-ceilinged great room that had once been a dormitory for male guests. A huge river-rock fireplace dominated the wall to her left, twin to the one in the dining room that helped make it so inviting. The three double-hung windows covered in long, sheer panels of voile that were currently moving in the breeze faced Lake Street and also had a view of the lake, as did the window in her bedroom. What had once been six smaller private rooms bisected by a hallway leading off the wall opposite the fireplace had now become a master suite and small bathroom on the hill side and three bedrooms along the lake side. Her old room, the first on the left, was above the foyer on the main floor, the others above the dining room. When she was little, Callie had often lain in bed and listened to the muffled sounds of laughter and low conversations and the chiming of silverware against the edge of a china plate downstairs.
The living area with its worn, overstuffed leather furniture—she remembered what a production it had been to get it up the stairs—was empty, the TV turned off. She had the place to herself. The bar was directly below her but the ceiling had been soundproofed years before, so unless there was a live band playing on the occasional Saturday night, the room was as quiet as any other home’s main living area.
She hurried into the hallway toward the bathroom. The itching was getting worse. She didn’t carry a black doctor’s bag in this day and age but she did have a very well-equipped first-aid kit in the Jeep and she’d transferred some cortisone-based skin cream to her duffel before she came upstairs.
A nice hot shower, clean hair, dry clothes, and relief from the itching on her feet and calves, and she’d be ready to face her new family. She opened the door of her bedroom and swung the heavy walnut panel inward. But it wasn’t her bedroom anymore. Gone were the pale pink rose-strewn sheers and matching comforter her mother had helped her pick out the year before she left. The walls were newly painted a cloudy gray, and the drapes at the windows were heavy and pleated and almost black, casting the room into shadows now that the sun had set. Her brass bed had been replaced by a futon with a blood-red throw scattered with half a dozen pillows in jewel tones. The walls were plastered with posters of dragons and gryphons, elves and sorceresses, and hard-muscled, broad-shouldered mystical warriors in armor and chain mail that oddly enough reminded Callie just a tiny bit of Zach Gibson as he’d been earlier, legs spread wide, wielding his shop vac instead of a magical sword.
“Hey, what are you doing in my bedroom without permission?” a voice demanded. Callie gave a little yelp of surprise. Her new stepsister had come up behind Callie without her noticing and was standing in the hallway, hands on hips, her chin thrust out at a stubborn angle.
Becca was not a pretty child. She was tall and reed thin with long, straight strawberry blond hair, freckles, and a nose that was too big and too sharp for her face. Someday she would grow out of this awkward stage and become a striking, if not classically beautiful, woman. But today, dressed in a pine-green T-shirt with the White Pine logo on the left breast pocket and khakis—the uniform of the restaurant’s waitstaff—she was just plain homely. Her expression was as belligerent as her tone of voice.
“I’m sorry,” Callie said, shutting the door. “I...I didn’t realize you’d moved into my...into this room.”
“The new baby’s getting my room,” Becca said. She was still scowling and Callie wasn’t able to tell if she was happy with the move or not.
Her twin, Brandon, stuck his head around his sister’s shoulder and stared at Callie’s bedraggled appearance. “What happened to you? You’re all wet.”
He had the same strawberry blond hair and blue-gray eyes as his sister, but the resemblance ended there. He was three inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier than his sister, with a linebacker’s build and a round baby face that would be the bane of his existence well into his thirties, Callie guessed.
“Hi, Brandon.” She smiled, and it wasn’t quite as forced as when she’d greeted Becca. Brandon was a lot less hostile than his sister, even if she had disappointed him at Christmas by buying him a Detroit
