Woodlands Page 3

  “Which way do I go?” Seth asked, maneuvering around Leah’s stalled vehicle and rolling down Fourth Street.

  “Turn right at the corner, then right again on Madison,” she said.

  “Have you lived here long?” Seth asked.

  “All my life,” Leah said.

  He glanced over at her and smiled. She couldn’t help but smile back.

  “I’m Seth Edwards, by the way,” he said.

  “I’m—”

  Before she could answer, he finished for her. “Leah. Leah Hudson. Right?”

  Leah looked at him more carefully. “How did you know that?”

  “I asked Kyle last night.”

  She nodded slowly, squinting her gray eyes when he glanced at her again. “And what else did Kyle tell you about me?”

  “Enough,” Seth said with a tease in his voice. He came to a four-way stop and said, “This is where I turned left last time.”

  “You need to keep going straight,” Leah told him. “We’ll go about four more blocks. You’re going to take a left and then another left. It’s a new housing development, and I don’t think it’s on the maps yet.”

  “That would explain it,” Seth said.

  “How long have you been in Glenbrooke?” Leah asked. She had no way of knowing how many details of her life Kyle had divulged to Seth. It seemed only fair that Seth volunteer some information about himself.

  “This is my fourth day in Glenbrooke,” he said. “I started working for PDS on Monday. You can see why I still can’t find my way around town.”

  “Don’t worry,” Leah said. “It’s pretty small; you’ll have it figured out in no time. This is where you want to turn. Right here.”

  He rounded the corner and then turned right again when they came to Medford Court.

  “It’s the beige house at the end of the court,” Leah said.

  “You can sure tell this is a new neighborhood,” Seth said. “It seems bare without all the trees and flowers the last street we were on had.”

  “I don’t care for the way all these houses look alike,” Leah said. “On the street where I live every house is different. Some are big with gorgeous landscaping. Then there’s my little cottage. I think the maple tree in the front yard is bigger than my house.”

  “I’d like to see it sometime,” Seth said before parking the van and jumping out. He went around to the back. A moment later he wheeled a large box up the Jamelsons’ driveway on a dolly.

  Leah leaned back in the seat and crossed her arms, watching Seth carry the large box up to the front door. What’s going on here? Why is this guy so attentive to me? He asked Kyle about me. Why? What did he mean when he said he’d like to see “it” sometime? Did he mean the maple tree or my house? Why would he want to see either of them? Who is this guy?

  Seth returned and showed Leah the next address on his clipboard. “This is the last one. The Glenbrooke Gazette on Main. I know how to get there. Would you like me to drop you off first, or do you have enough time to drive around with me?”

  Leah was loving this. Of course she wanted to ride around with him some more. But all her suspicions had risen to the surface, and first she felt compelled to explore them. “I have the time,” Leah said slowly.

  “Good,” Seth said.

  “But I have to ask,” Leah added. “Why are you doing this? I mean, first helping me at the Snack Shack last night and now this.”

  Seth smiled and reached for his sunglasses as they turned left and headed into the early evening sun. “I guess this isn’t exactly fair to you. You see, I’m related to one of your biggest fans.”

  “My biggest fan? I didn’t know I had any fans.”

  “How about Franklin Madison?” Seth flashed her a grin.

  Franklin Madison and his late wife had been close friends of Leah’s grandparents and lived three doors down from them. As a child, Leah took bouquets of tulips to the Madisons’ every year on May Day. She used to leave the flowers in a water-filled mayonnaise jar on their front doorstep, ring the doorbell, and run and hide behind the neighbor’s lilac bush.

  At ninety-two, Franklin was the last living relative of Cameron Madison, who had founded Glenbrooke in the 1870s.

  “You’re related to Franklin Madison?” Leah scanned Seth’s profile for a resemblance. He certainly didn’t have Franklin’s long nose and narrow chin. Seth’s chin was rounded and more masculine than Franklin’s was. Seth’s nose was broad, but not too broad. It fit his face and was a good balance to his deep-set, dark blue eyes, which were hidden behind his sunglasses.

  “Franklin is my great-uncle.” Seth grinned. “Last week was the first time I’ve seen him in ten years. Maybe even longer. Twenty years, maybe.” Seth stopped at a red light and put on his turn signal, prepared to turn onto Main Street without any direction from Leah.

  “You know what?” Leah said, studying Seth’s profile another moment. “I’ve seen your picture. Franklin has your high school graduation picture on his mantle.”

  “Yes, he does. I saw it there the other day,” Seth said.

  “And I remember Franklin talking about you, too. You’re the one who went to Europe instead of going to college, aren’t you?”

  “I went to college,” Seth said defensively. “True, I took some time off and traveled through Europe, but I returned home to Boulder; that’s where I grew up. I went to the University of Colorado there. Took me five years, but I graduated.”

  Leah had heard so many stories about Franklin’s twenty-four grandchildren and great-nephews and -nieces that she wasn’t sure which of the stories were about Seth. “He may have told me that. I don’t remember.”

  “Did he tell you I’ve been in Costa Rica for the past four years?”

  Leah laughed aloud as she made the connection. “So you’re the one! Yes, he told me all about you. He calls you the hippie boy in the rain forest.”

  Seth glanced at Leah and grinned slowly. “Yep, that’s me. Not exactly at the top of Franklin’s list of favorite people. You are, though, you know. You’re right at the top of his list.”

  Leah ignored the comment and asked, “So what are you doing in Glenbrooke?”

  Seth parked the van on Main Street in front of the Glenbrooke Gazette. He pulled off his sunglasses, and raising his eyebrows, he said to Leah with a sly grin, “I’m here to obtain the favor of Uncle Franklin so that when he dies he’ll leave all his riches to me.” With that he hopped out of the delivery van and hurried across Main Street with a large manila mailer in his hand.

  Leah sat still, her eyebrows furrowed. Was he serious? He couldn’t be serious. Franklin doesn’t have any riches. He lives in that old house and eats spaghetti and canned green beans. Seth had to be joking.

  Leah leaned back in the front seat of the delivery van and tried to remember what else Franklin had told her about this “hippie boy.” She knew Franklin had mentioned Seth over the years because he was the only one of the clan who had done much traveling. She remembered three postcards Franklin had kept on his coffee table for several years. One was of the Austrian Alps, one of the Seine River in Paris, and one was of Venice. That was Leah’s favorite. The postcard pictured a gondola docked by a red-and-white-striped pole. The gondolier, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat with its blue ribbon hanging down the back, stood on the dock. He leaned casually against the pole and indicated with his hand that his gondola was available for the next rider.

  Seth had sent those postcards.

  Every time Leah had visited Franklin, she would study the cards, especially the one from Venice. And if Franklin wasn’t watching, Leah would whisper to the gondolier, “Wait for me. One day I really will come ride in your gondola.”

  She hadn’t yet made good on that promise. For years she had dreamed of exotic travel adventures but could never pursue any such whims because of her obligation to her ailing parents.

  A wash of insecurities came over Leah. If Franklin considered Seth the hippie in the rain forest, then how had Franklin spo
ken of her to Seth? Did Franklin consider her the matronly nurse, destined to make house calls offering charity to all the old people of Glenbrooke until she herself was too old to leave her rocking chair?

  Just as she was beginning to feel overwhelmed with self-doubts, Seth returned with a grin on his face. “Kenton says hi,” he said.

  Leah looked out the van’s windshield. She couldn’t see into the front window of the newspaper office, but she could guess that Kenton Buchanan, the owner and editor of the paper was in there, watching her in the PDS van with Seth. Leah smiled and waved at the window, which, due to the sun’s angle, only reflected the image of the delivery van.

  “I suppose you figured out that Kenton and Kyle are brothers,” Leah said. “The Buchanan boys.”

  “So he just told me. News travels fast around this burg, doesn’t it?” Seth started the engine but kept his foot on the brake. “I asked Kyle about his dog last night, and he told me he has three puppies at home. I’m going there now to pick one. By any chance would you like to come with me?”

  Leah nodded. “Sure.” As long as the whole town knew she was spending her Thursday evening driving around with the new boy in town, she might as well show up at Kyle and Jessica’s with him. After all, Seth had admitted he had asked Kyle about her. Why not give her friends something to speculate about? Especially since she was the one who was starting to speculate the most.

  Chapter Four

  After Seth dropped off the delivery van at the PDS main terminal, he and Leah climbed into his rusted Subaru station wagon and headed for Kyle and Jessica’s Victorian mansion on the top of Madison Hill. Leah had lots of questions for Seth but couldn’t ask them because Seth kept talking. He told her about how he had found a place to live in Edgefield, twenty miles away, and had moved in last week. He was hired for his job with PDS after answering an ad in the paper, and the car had been sitting on a used car lot a mile from his apartment, just waiting for him.

  Leah still couldn’t understand why he had left Costa Rica for this. She was sure that if she ever got away from Glenbrooke, Oregon, she would stay wherever she was as long as she could. Especially if it was some place as exotically romantic as Costa Rica.

  “What did you do while you were in Costa Rica?”

  “I worked for Real Planet Adventures. Have you ever heard of them?”

  Leah shook her head.

  “They run tours for young people’s groups. We usually worked with high school students.”

  “So that explains your experience with snack lines.”

  “Exactly. We would take them through a three-week course: backpacking, kayaking, sometimes orienteering. We would give them a couple of matches and a bag of granola, and they would have three days to find their way out of the rain forest.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t exactly that severe, but you get the idea. The program was designed to develop leadership skills. The most interesting groups were the management teams sent to us by big corporations. We would have four days to build them into what the brochure called ‘a harmonious team’ before sending them back to the concrete jungle. Those groups were always the biggest challenge.”

  Leah could believe that. She could also believe that Seth had enough leadership skills to take on any group of students or corporate managers and handily shape them into a team.

  So why is he delivering packages in this insignificant corner of the planet?

  “Why did you leave?”

  Seth glanced at her and looked surprised. It took him a moment before he said, “I turned twenty-nine last month.”

  Leah wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, although it gave her a small sense of comfort to realize he was older than she was.

  The grand, two-story Victorian mansion came into full view, and Seth stopped the car to take it all in before continuing up the driveway. “Wow! They sure fixed that place up. I only saw it once, when I was in eighth grade. We came to Glenbrooke for my great-aunt’s funeral.”

  Leah hadn’t gone to that funeral, but she remembered when Franklin’s wife, Naomi, had passed away. She also remembered how creepy the old Madison Estate used to look when she was a child. It had been vacant since the ’50s, and when Kyle and Jessica bought it almost seven years ago, it had taken months of extensive renovations before they could move in.

  The gem of Madison Hill now glistened, creamy white and inviting. New life had been breathed into the old masterpiece of a house. A wide porch wrapped around the front, complete with a porch swing on the right and a set of wicker furniture on the left. Large, moss-lined baskets of Martha Washington geraniums hung at intervals across the porch’s overhang. A rounded turret ran up the side of the house and was topped by a pointed spiral and a rooster weathervane. The gingerbread trim along the roofline had been repainted recently and made the house look fresh in the glow of another gorgeous spring evening.

  “These Buchanans must have some money,” Seth observed. “What does Kyle do when he’s not coaching Little League teams?”

  Leah didn’t know how much to tell Seth. The truth was, the money came from Jessica. When Jessica married Kyle, she was a millionaire. However, Jessica didn’t like people to know that, and she and Kyle had done a commendable job of settling in and living a fairly normal life in Glenbrooke. The initial shock and novelty of her wealth had worn off, and over the years it had become less and less of an issue to the townspeople.

  “Kyle does a lot of things,” Leah said. “They have some money.”

  Then, in an effort to redirect the conversation, she said, “I wonder why your great-uncle never moved into this mansion. You know it was built by his grandfather, Cameron Madison.”

  “Funny you should mention that. I asked Franklin just a few days ago.” Seth slowed down as he neared the top of the driveway. “Cameron was bankrupt when he died. He put all his fortune into building this house and was so in debt by the time he died that the place was no longer his to will to anyone. I’ll be honest,” Seth said, parking the car. “I’m really curious to see inside.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Leah said.

  The golden retriever that had been barking at them from the front porch now bounded down the steps to greet them. Travis, the Buchanans’ oldest son, held open the screen door and called out, “Hi, Auntie Leah. Did you bring the eggs?”

  “No, I haven’t finished them yet. Are you looking forward to the big party on Saturday?”

  Travis nodded and looked shyly at Seth.

  “Travis, this is Seth Edwards. He’s come to look at your puppies.”

  Travis’s cherub face lit up. “I’ll show them to you. They’re in the laundry room.”

  Seth trailed behind Leah as they followed Travis into the house. Seth seemed to be taking in the hardwood floors, the spectacular staircase, and the evening sunlight coming in through the door’s beveled glass. Travis led them down the hallway into the kitchen where Jessica was clearing the dinner table.

  The toddler of the family, Emma, squealed with delight when she saw Leah and hopped down from her chair to run into Leah’s open arms. Leah kissed her soundly on the cheek and then proceeded to tickle her madly. As Emma tossed her curls and burst into giggles, Leah tried to introduce Seth to Jessica. Fortunately, Kyle stepped in from the back room and finished the introductions.

  The Buchanans’ youngest, Sara, sat in her highchair and pounded her spoon on the high chair tray, demanding some attention, too.

  “I wasn’t ignoring you, Sara Bunny,” Leah said, going over to the high chair while Emma clung to her like a baby koala bear. Leah managed to release Sara from the high chair and scooped her up, holding a happy little girl on each hip. “Do you two want to show Seth your puppies?”

  “I was going to show him,” Travis said, standing in the doorway of the laundry room with his hands behind his back.

  “I can hear them,” Seth said. “Why don’t you all show me?”

  Kyle, a tall, good-looking man in his mid-t
hirties, stayed in the kitchen and slipped his arm around his wife, Jessica. She was a gentle-spirited woman and more of a big sister to Leah than any of her own sisters had been.

  Jessica rested her fair-skinned cheek against Kyle’s chest. “Let us know if you guys need any help, although I doubt you will. Travis is our resident expert on the puppies.”

  Leah followed Travis into the large laundry room. A separate area had been sectioned off by a board that was low enough for Lady, the young mother golden retriever, to step over. Lady lay comfortably curled up on top of what looked like a flat beanbag pillow. Leah had one, too, for her dog, Hula. The pillow was filled with cedar chips and was supposed to ward off fleas.

  As Seth bent down, the three beautiful bundles of vanilla fluff yelped and tumbled over each other in an effort to climb out of their box and play with the visitors.

  “They’re silly puppies,” little Emma said.

  Sara patted Leah’s cheek with a sticky hand.

  “They have gotten so big since I was here last!” Leah said. “Look at that one.”

  The largest of the three fur balls romped toward them with a strip of bed sheet tangled around his hind leg. He took a flying leap in an effort to jump over the board barricade. He would have made it, too, if one of his siblings hadn’t been sitting on the other end of the sheet, halting his escape in midair. The confused pup hung halfway over the board with the sheet still holding him by the leg.

  Seth reached for the daredevil and released his hind leg from the sheet. Lifting him up for a closer look, Seth said, “You’re quite a little Bungee jumper, aren’t you?”

  “They never could jump that far before,” Travis said with concern. “Daddy, come here.”

  Kyle entered, and Travis told the story of the flying puppy.

  “Sounds like we better find a taller board,” Kyle said.

  “Or send this one home with me,” Seth suggested. Then, in a tender gesture that made Leah smile, Seth squatted down to eye level with Travis and said, “What do you think? Is this puppy looking for a new home?” The pup licked Seth’s chin as if right on cue.