She told herself to quit being so fanciful. No matter how many times she visited the little town it never seemed to change. It still felt as though she was entering a place as remote and hidden as Brigadoon. If it weren’t for her constant contact with Kim and her many visits, Jecca would have said it was possible that Edilean didn’t really exist. Maybe it was a place she’d made up in that long-ago summer when she’d escaped the hardware store for two glorious weeks of painting.
The memory of those weeks came back to her. How she threw herself at Kim’s older brother! Even now, she was embarrassed just thinking about it. Thank heaven he’d not taken her up on her blatant offers. At the time, his pain had seemed romantic, but since then she’d been through the breakup of a serious relationship and she knew there was nothing in the least romantic about what had happened to him.
In all her other visits, she’d flown into Richmond and someone had picked her up. This was the first time that she had driven here, and this visit was to be all summer. But no matter how she arrived in Edilean, it still always amazed and fascinated her.
As the forest of trees parted, she saw the beginning of the town. There were pretty little houses lining the road, nearly all of them with deep front porches. Rather than being a depository for whatever didn’t fit inside, the porches had chairs on them, and some of them held people who were watching the passing cars. As she slowed down to twenty-five miles per hour, she lifted her hand to an old man and he waved back. Jecca had an idea that if she stopped he would ask her to “sit a spell” and have a glass of hom
emade lemonade.
She kept driving and came to the “downtown” area. Since she’d spent the last few years in New York City, the idea that this was the central business district was almost laughable. There was a square with adorably cute little shops around it, and another one with an ancient oak tree in the center.
When she stopped at the only traffic light in town, Jecca watched people strolling about the very clean streets. No one seemed to be in a hurry. She saw them smile and wave, and greet each other by name. There seemed to be an abundance of baby strollers, and women paused to look at one another’s chubby healthy infants.
Heaven deliver me, Jecca thought as the light changed. She knew that Kim loved the town with a passion that bordered on an obsession, but Jecca wanted a city.
But right now, she looked forward to being in little Edilean. She had three whole months to dofasX nothing but paint. Working in an art gallery in a big city paid the bills, but it didn’t feed her deep desire to create. There was nothing like taking a piece of paper and filling it with form and color—or with words, for that matter. Or taking a bit of wax and melting it into something beautiful, then casting it into jewelry, as Kim did. Or a lump of clay to shape into a creature or a person, as their friend Sophie did.
For Jecca, to make beauty from nothing was her ultimate goal in life, what she always strove to achieve. What she wanted most in the world was to be like Kim and figure out a way to make a living from her creations. Maybe in these three months she could make some paintings that would actually sell.
She was thinking so hard about what was ahead for her, meaning the time to do nothing but create, that she drove past the little street sign. She made a U-turn and went back to Aldredge Road. She couldn’t help smiling every time she saw the name. A couple hundred years ago the pathway had been named for one of Kim’s ancestors.
“Our branch of the family doesn’t own Aldredge House and we don’t live on that road,” she’d told Jecca long ago.
Maybe not, Jecca thought, but her family was still in the same town.
Jecca made a left turn and immediately felt as though she’d entered a wilderness—which she had. Kim had told her that sometime in the 1950s the U.S. government decided to make the whole area a nature preserve. They nonchalantly—as though it wouldn’t really bother anyone—told the people of Edilean that they had to leave the area. All their houses, some of them built in the 1600s, were to be demolished. The government officials were surprised when the residents loudly, vehemently, and very publicly refused to leave—and certainly not tear down any buildings.
Jecca had heard the story of how one of the older residents, a Miss Edi, had spent years fighting and had finally won the battle to allow the town to stay intact. However, the catch was that the wilderness had been allowed to surround the town, cutting it off from the rest of the world until it was, in Jecca’s opinion, much too isolated.
Because of that battle, which had been hard-won in the courts, families that had lived in Edilean for centuries still owned land that was in the midst of what was, in essence, national forest.
As Jecca drove down Aldredge Road, she felt as though there couldn’t possibly be a house at the end of it. At least not one with plumbing. But Kim had told her there were two of them. First was Aldredge House, where the local doctor lived. He was, of course, Kim’s cousin and she swore that Jecca had met him on her first visit, but she didn’t remember. In Jecca’s mind, that summer was a blur of Reede and painting. After the doctor’s house was Mrs. Wingate’s place.
“It’s new,” Kim had said on the phone when Jecca called her before she left. “The house was built in 1926 by Olivia Wingate’s late father-in-law. He came here from Chicago.”
“New people, huh?”
“Of course,” Kim said, her tongue firmly in her cheek. “If they didn’t settle in Edilean before the American Revolutionary War, they’re . . .” She paused and waited.
“Newcomers!” they said in un"0ey said ison, and laughed together.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” Jecca said. “My dad likes to brag that his grandfather opened the hardware store in 1918. He thinks that’s really old, but you guys . . .”
“Yeah, I know,” Kim said. “We’re a little backward here, but last week we did get our first fax machine.”
“You’re kidding,” Jecca said.
“Yes, I’m kidding. So when do you get here?”
“Day after tomorrow. I should be there about one.”
“Great. We’ll have lunch together.”
“Cracker Barrel will miss me.”
They hung up, laughing.
When Jecca had been told she was to have the summer off, she’d been shocked. Her boss had decided to close the gallery for three months while she and her new husband wandered around Europe. Jecca still got her base salary, no sales commissions, no bonuses for a job well done, but it was enough to live on—if she was very frugal, that is. Plus, she’d been able to sublet her Gramercy Park apartment to her sister-in-law’s cousin, so that helped.