As Night Falls

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Chapter One

Thomas Wolfe was full of it. You could go home again. Home was center, a safe place in a world gone insane or a life that had gone headfirst into the crapper. Home was a refuge, a place--perhaps the only place--where it didn't matter what a crashing failure you'd become.

Braking her canary yellow Jeep CJ-7 on a rise in the long, winding drive, Dr. Abigail Youngblood sat in the cool shade of an afternoon turned strangely steamy and drank in the welcome picture the old mansion made.

Dappled by the warm autumn sun shining down through the surrounding red-gold maples, Gilead Manor gleamed like a rare gem on the leaf-scattered lawn, an odd mixture of Dutch and Georgian influences. The central structure was made of salmon-colored brick. Built large and square, it had outlasted eight generations of Youngbloods, the identical gray sandstone wings flanking the original structure on either side only slightly less. There had always been an air of age and stability about the place that called out to Abby, probably because she'd had so little permanence in her own life, as David had so aptly pointed out the few times they had discussed it.

The connection and the reasons for it didn't matter as much as the fact that it existed, and that it was real, unlike her marriage, unlike the trust she'd given to the man she'd married ... a man she'd discovered she didn't even know.

Pushing it all to the back of her mind--the arguments, David's secrets and lies--Abby breathed in the dusky autumn air, the scent of black humus and a season at its fullest, or on the verge of decay, depending on how one looked at it. God, it felt good to be home. For a moment, she sat in the middle of the drive, a death grip on the steering wheel, waiting for some sign that she'd made the right decision, that maybe, just maybe, the nightmare she'd lived for the past six months hadn't followed her home to the Catskills.

Then, as the bright leaves drifted down and the rich, ripe smell of autumn insinuated its way into her senses, she drew a shaky breath and loosened her grip on the wheel. David would have sneered at her decision to come home. Running away from it, Abby? Taking the easy way out?

"I'm not running away," Abby muttered defensively. "It's temporary. It'll give me a little stability until I can get my bearings, decide what comes next. There's nothing wrong with that. Besides, I'm not the one who destroyed it all; I'm not the one who took the easy way out. I'm still here, aren't I? I'm still alive, and doing my damnedest to cope.... Okay," she admitted, "so I'm talking to myself. I never said I was all the way there, but I'm definitely working on it."

She was working on it. Making progress, too, damn it. After some desperately needed R and R, she would be ready to take stock, deal with her ghosts, and weigh her options, then begin to reconstruct her life from the wreckage remaining. There must be something salvageable, she reasoned. Some remaining threads she could pick up and weave into something meaningful--something productive. She was just too blind at the moment to see it.

It was good to have a plan, and it gave Abby something solid to focus on as she slipped the Jeep into gear. Yet, as she nosed it forward, a small red sports car leaped into her rearview mirror. The Corvette topped the rise doing sixty. As Abby braced herself for the inevitable collision, the driver cut out around the Jeep, flinging gravel and dirt as it narrowly missed Abby's right rear fender. The driver, bottle-blonde and nowhere near twenty-one, lay on her horn and threw an obscene salute out the window.

"This is a private drive, damn it!" Abby shouted into the cloud of dust left in the girl's reckless wake. The car continued another fifty yards past the mansion, then swung sharply left, sliding to a stop in front of the carriage house, which, having outlived its original purpose a century ago, had been transformed into a guest house.

As Abby watched in disbelief, the car door opened and the driver wriggled her way across the porch and through the front door of the guest house; amazingly, her companion turned to wave. Beth Langtry had been on the fringes of Abby's high school clique a decade ago. Yet, if the local gossip had a grain of truth in it, Beth had peaked emotionally during her junior year, and at twenty-nine still wasn't past the party scene.

Abby shook her head. Almost simultaneously, the driving beat of an old Lynyrd Skynyrd song kicked up a notch, transcending the slim barrier separating merely intrusive from utterly ridiculous.

Abby parked the Jeep beside Catherine's green Mercedes and, shooting an irritated frown at the source of the commotion, took her bags from the back. "Let it go, Abby," she said under her breath. "Just stay focused ... stay centered." She took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly, as the instructor of her rage-management class had taught her. Then another. "Home is center," she said, convinced but not quite there. "Center, right now, is everything."

She opened the door to the mansion and put her suitcase down just inside, still feeling frazzled despite her mantra. "Aunt Catherine?"

Abby didn't hear Rose's footfalls, or realize that Catherine's housekeeper had entered from the kitchen, until the older woman touched her arm. Startled, Abby jumped, her hand automatically flying to her chest, balling into a fist.

She met the housekeeper's gaze. The look of concern was there on Rose's face, just as she'd known it would be. Abby clenched her jaw and somehow managed to weather it.

She wasn't fragile, she wasn't helpless, and she'd be damned if a sympathetic look would cause her to shatter into a million tiny shards of jagged humanity.

"How you doin', Miss Abigail?"

"I'm fine," Abby insisted. "Just fine, Rose. Thanks for asking."

Rose assessed her with a single critical glance. "Fine, she says. Well, if you're so fine, then how come you look like ten miles of bad county road?"

"I'm a little tired is all," Abby said defensively. "And maybe a little dehydrated. Six glasses of spring water and a nap and I'll be as good as new."

"Ha! Skinny is what you are. Why, I've seen fence posts with more curves than you got. What have they been feedin' you at that university? Why don't I fix you somethin'? Got a fresh batch of chowder on the stove. That and a little crusty bread'll put some meat back on those bones."

Rose had been managing Gilead Manor and everyone in it for as long as Abby could remember. She knew the old mansion's every nuance, knew every detail of Catherine's life, and Abby's. She pried into their affairs, kept their confidences, and doled out advice whether they asked for it or not. Rose was a household fixture; she was indispensable. Gilead Manor couldn't manage without her, and even worse, she knew it.

The commotion outside was filtering in. The bass on the stereo throbbed in the still air, alive, oppressive, vastly irritating. Gritting her teeth, Abby raised a hand to her temple and concentrated on blocking out the sound.

"Headache?" Rose asked.

"Big time."

"Come on, then, and I'll get you a nice cup of catnip tea to go with that chowder. Patricia," she called out to her granddaughter. "Honey, Miss Abigail's home. Put the kettle on. Don't you worry, Miss Abigail. We're gonna take care of everything."

Abby drank in the feel of the old place as she followed Rose to the kitchen. It was a wonderful room, with a red-brick hearth wall and a huge fireplace. The old fireplace oven was still in excellent working condition, thanks in no small part to Catherine.

Catherine was the keeper of the Youngblood heritage, steward of the past. If not for Catherine's tireless efforts, the mansion would have been reduced to rubble long ago, since her brother, William, Abby's father, didn't give a rat's ass about saving the past for posterity.

He was too caught up in the all-encompassing process of acquiring his next trophy wife while dealing with alimony payments that rivaled the National Debt to concern himself with the preservation of the family legacy--or his own legacy, for that matter. Abby hadn't spoken to him in almost three years--not since he'd married Cecilia, wife number six and counting. He hadn't even had the decency to put in an appearance at David's memorial service. Not that she'd expected he would. He had sent flowers from Rio, along with a terse and meaningless message neatly penned by his secretary. Not that he'd disliked David. To dislike someone, one had to take the time to get to know the person. And as far as William was concerned, time was money, and sex, and power--all of which eclipsed his only daughter, and had for her entire life.

Abby hadn't really expected more from him. It was learned behavior, after all. Pavlov's dogs in reverse. And while there was no denying the fact that her father was a genuine prick, at least he was a consistent prick, and therefore he gave her few unpleasant surprises.

It was more than she could say for David.