After a moment’s hesitation, Jared laughed. “Very diplomatic of you.”
“I know I shouldn’t ask, but how did he get to design a building when he was just fifteen?”
“He worked with a master builder who let him … let me design it.” His voice grew softer as he remembered that time and they began to walk again. “I drew my ideas with a stick in the dirt, so he taught me rudimentary drafting. He showed me how to use a triangle and a T-square, and my first drafting table was an old door on sawhorses, with—”
“With triangular pieces of plywood to put it on a slant,” Alix said.
“It’s like you’ve seen it.”
“My dad made me one like that. But he used the bottom half of a Dutch door.”
“How old were you?” Jared asked.
“Eight.” She gave a little laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“I was just thinking about the Legos. I guess I left the ones you gave me behind, because later I was in a store with my dad and I saw boxes of them. I still remember how I went crazy and started crying. I was never a tantrum-throwing kind of kid, but I don’t think I’ve ever before or since wanted anything as much as I wanted those. Dad seemed to understand because he filled a cart with sets of them.”
Jared was grinning. “Did you use them?”
“Constantly! But my mother hated them because the little pieces were all over the house. She used to say, ‘Kenneth, my child is going to grow up to be a writer. She doesn’t need those annoying little blocks.’ ”
“What did your father say to that?”
She lowered her voice. “He said, ‘She’s already an architect. I don’t think she can be what both of us are.’ ”
“It looks like he was right,” Jared said.
“He was. While I was growing up, Mom tried to get me to make up stories but they just weren’t there. If I heard a story I could write it, that was easy for me, but I couldn’t do what my mother does and come up with fantastic plots.”
“You can write but not plot?” He sounded amused by something that used to plague Alix when she was growing up.
“That’s about it, but then whoever heard of things in real life like what happened in my mother’s books? Murder, secret rooms hiding criminals, forbidden love, scheming and plotting to get some old house, and—” When she looked at him, she saw that he was staring at her in shock. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m horrified by what people read. Now you’re the one looking strange.”
“I’m still adjusting to the fact that my mother spent every August here and not in Colorado.”
He didn’t think she had told him everything on her mind, so he waited for her to continue.
“I just thought of something,” she said. “Your family is old, and your house is old.”
“Please tell me you aren’t thinking that my family is the prototype for a bunch of murderers.”
She barely heard him. The idea that her mother had based all of her books on the Kingsley family was becoming stronger and stronger. Was it possible that her mother’s outrageous novels were true?
Jared had an idea of what Alix was thinking and he didn’t like it. He truly believed that a person’s family history should be kept private. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face a house. “This is Montgomery at sixteen.”
Alix just stood there blinking. One of her mother’s books was about a soap recipe that had become the basis for the whole family’s wealth. “Kingsley Soap,” Alix whispered, her eyes wide. It was a real product and the wrapper said it had been around for centuries. It wasn’t a big seller today, but bars of it were still in every grocery in the country. Her dad’s mother used to swear by it.
“You’re right,” Jared said loudly. “This couldn’t be a Montgomery design. The windows aren’t right and he would never make dormers like those monstrosities.” He started walking down the street.
“He would make them just like that,” Alix said as she tried to pull her mind away from the soap.
Jared stopped walking and turned to look at her.
“The Danwell house,” she said. “It has dormers exactly like that.”