Date Published January 2021
Publisher: Speaking Volumes
Forty-four-year-old Forrest Alderson isn’t at all sure of his motives for returning from self-imposed exile to Asher Heights, West Virginia, to see his hometown for the first time since he graduated from college. All he knows for certain is it’s something he has to do if he is to find out whether he can break free from the tragedy that compelled him to flee or whether he is forever doomed to be imprisoned by it.
He has spent the intervening twenty-three years in sacrificial preparation, striving obsessively to become enormously wealthy with one exclusive goal: to at long last take possession of Old Mrs. Kimble’s mansion, no matter the cost, and let that magnificent structure he has coveted since he was a poor boy stand as proof to one and all that native son Forrest Walker Alderson has done himself proud.
Or could it be his return is motivated – as his attorney, Olivia Fillmore, fears – by revenge, an evil desire to rub his great wealth and success into the face of the one person who caused him to hermit himself away all those years without a wife, children, or even a close friend?
To have any chance of finding the answers he so desperately needs, Forrest will have to struggle through a challenging new romance, an addiction to a perilous old love, a sensational murder trial, and the inevitable decision about what to do with the rest of his life.
Excerpt
Chapter One
A Curious Request
1985
“Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that,” Mr. Vermillion utters as he
hangs up his phone and steps into the outer office to share the news with
Cassandra Pierce, his partner at their law firm on Stanford Avenue in downtown
Asher Heights, West Virginia.
“Not expecting what, John?” Cassandra mumbles, her mind focused on her
day’s work schedule.
“A call with a curious request from a big-shot attorney at one of
Chi-cago’s most prestigious outfits.”
“Oh?” Cassandra responds with a little more enthusiasm, sensing she
could be about to hear something that might provide a break from the monotony
in the daily routine of a couple of small-town lawyers.
“Get this, Cassandra. It seems someone who doesn’t want us to know his
identity is hiring us to buy the old Kimble mansion for him, and never anybody
mind that it may not even be on the market.”
“Fine with me,” Cassandra answers without looking up from her pa-pers,
“but what if it’s not for sale? What makes that Chicago lawyer representing
‘Mr. Anonymous’ think we, of all people, can buy it? We’re not even in the real
estate business.”
“To me, that’s the challenging part, my friend. That and the
mysteri-ous nature of the request. ‘Money’s no object!’ ” she said. “In fact,
she said it twice.
“The guy is so dead set on having that mansion, its condition is no barrier either. And what’s more, he’s sending us a five-thousand-dollar retainer this afternoon!”
“Well, whoop-de-doo,” Cassandra
responds sarcastically. “Five thou-sand whole dollars? C’mon, John, there’s no
way you’d be this giddy over that amount of money. What gives?”
“Oh, just a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus if we can
persuade the owners to sell within the next two weeks. Tell me that’s not
enough to get even your skeptical little heart pumping, Cassandra. So, you as
ready as I am to get this adventure started?”
“Five figures does have a way of getting a gal’s
attention!” she con-cedes, dropping the papers she had been carefully
organizing as if they were so many used napkins. “How ’bout doing a drive by
right now? We have an hour before we have to be in court.”
“I’m game. Your car or mine?”
***
Unknown to John Vermillion, the offbeat phone call was
set in mo-tion by an old acquaintance from his high school graduation class of
1959. Someone he has not seen or even thought about in more than twenty years.
“I knew I had my surrogate as soon as I checked out
the list of Asher Heights lawyers and saw John’s name,” Forrest Alderson
explains, sitting in the Chicago office of his primary attorney, Olivia
Fillmore, who possesses a law degree from Yale, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and
head-turner beauty.
“John wasn’t one of my run-around friends, but he was one of the best of the good guys I grew up with,” Forrest assures Olivia. “And I picked you to handle things for me because I trust you more than any-body else in this overpriced law empire I’ve been paying a fortune in retainer fees all these years.”
“Appreciate that, Forrest,” the
fashionably slender Olivia responds, uncrossing her pretty long legs and
leaning forward in her chair, touching his forearm to indicate she is
personally concerned about Forrest and his astonishing lifestyle change.
“But what I don’t get is why at forty-four you’ve sold
one of the most successful real estate firms in Chicago to retire back to your
home town of Nowheresville when you haven’t stepped foot in the place since you
were shaving fuzz off your face.
“And what in the hell do you want with an old mansion
that, for all you know, may be dilapidated and overrun with raccoons and
squirrels and Lord knows what all else you West Virginians have lurking in
those hills you hold so precious?
“In the three years I’ve known you, Forrest, you’ve
never once men-tioned that old place.”
“Well, seeing as how you brought it up—and considering
I’m not paying one thin dime for this conversation—I’ll tell you about it. And
I want you to know,” he winks, “you can feel privileged because you’ll be the
first to hear something I’ve never said out loud even to myself.”
“I’m all ears,” she retorts, more annoyed than amused
by his cavalier attitude, and once again irritated by his apparent inability to
notice her subtle attempts to flirt with him. She scoots to the back of her
chair and crosses her legs again, showing a bit more thigh than she otherwise
would if she were not attracted to him.
Oblivious as usual, Forrest begins his explanation. “Olivia, as far back as I can remember, that big mansion on Rhododendron Ridge belonged to a woman known as Old Mrs. Kimble. And I don’t say that disrespectfully; that’s what everybody called her. I never knew her first name, and neither did any of my buddies. We figured it wasn’t ‘Old,’ but we never heard anything else.
“Funny thing, none of us actually
ever saw her either. We were told she’d become a very young widow when her
husband was killed during the Spanish-American War. Folks say that forever
after that, she secluded herself in that huge house, sometime around the turn
of the century.”
“As young and as rich as she was, she never got
married again, For-rest?”
“Nope. Never so much as looked romantically at another
man, or so I’m told, Olivia. And there must have been all kinds of
suitors—sincere ones, as well as fortune hunters. But she spurned every one of
them.
“I sort of got acquainted with the mansion and the
stories about Old Mrs. Kimble because her next-door neighbors were the
Rutherfords, and their son Whitney was one of my best friends. Actually, I was
lucky to have him for a friend because the Rutherfords had money, unlike my
family and most of the other guys Whitney and I ran around with.
“His dad could afford to build a hard-surface
basketball court near the long line of hedges that separated their property
from the mansion. And Whitney’s parents didn’t seem to mind having a bunch of
us boys hang-ing around playing ball four or five days out of the week.
“We practically lived on that court from the fourth
grade through high school. Except when it snowed, and it did a lot of that in
Asher Heights, West Virginia.”
“Got it, Forrest. You had a friend who had a
basketball court, and it snows a lot in West Virginia. Think you might get
around to telling me about the house anytime in the near future?”
“Well, don’t you get surly when you’re not getting
paid, Olivia! Nev-er noticed you being so antsy when I’m forking over hundreds
of dollars an hour for you to listen. Keep your drawers on, as we West
Virginians say; I’m getting to it.
“I couldn’t miss looking at the house because the basketball goal faced its east side. And it was so big and fancy I couldn’t help being impressed. So, if you can quit squirming long enough, I’ll describe it to you in some detail.”
“I’m listening. See!” she exclaims, pushing her ears
out horizontally with the palms of her hands.
“Then picture this, Miss Impatient: The mansion sat
about a hundred yards from the street, and the big woods in back stretched all
the way to McDowell Road, which runs parallel to Rhododendron Ridge. Not
counting the full-sized underground basement, it stood two tall stories high
with the first floor about ten feet above street level.
“What I liked best by far were the massive round white
columns that started at the base of the wrap-around porch and peaked at the
level of the attic. I felt like a pygmy the first time I saw them!
“The rest consisted of walls formed from thousands of
white bricks with squishy mortar of the same color bulging out between them.
The bricks surrounded giant oak double doors and a bunch of tall windows and
shutters.
“You couldn’t see through them though, and believe me
we tried. They were mostly hidden by telephone-pole-tall juniper trees. And Old
Mrs. Kimble kept all of her draperies and curtains closed to keep us and
everybody else from peeking in on her. So, obviously, we never got inside
either, which led us boys to imagine the house possessed every-thing from
secret treasures to some other really creepy stuff.
“You following me so far, Olivia?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m almost getting curious. Get on with it
before I turn middle-aged.”
Forrest was tempted to remind her that forty is
middle-aged. But you just don’t say that sort of thing to any woman,
particularly a good-looking one who has the self-image of a twenty-something.
“Anyway, Oliva, even though I was pretty young, that vision of a rich person’s home found a permanent place in my memory. You see, my family lived from paycheck to paycheck, so all I could do was daydream about a lot of the things I wanted but couldn’t have, even imagining someday being master of that awesome house.
“But the thought was so foolish, I kept it to myself
until today. I mean, what could I envision as a boy that I could do short of
robbery to put enough money together to buy an estate so fine? It wasn’t like I
could count on inheriting a family fortune or becoming a big movie star, or
anything as unlikely as that.
“Anyhow, it became an obsession never far from my
thoughts, even now, more than three decades later.”
“OK, I understand the attraction, Forrest; it sounds
both fabulous and a little mysterious. But, for Heaven’s sake, you’ve been
filthy rich for quite a while. Why haven’t you been back home to see it and to
visit your old friends? You could have bought that place a long time ago, hired
a caretaker and visited whenever you had the time or the inclination. Doesn’t
make sense to me.”
“I suppose it doesn’t, Olivia. But the reasons are
painfully personal. Something else I’ve kept to myself.”
“I’m a good listener Forrest; that is, when I’m
interested. And now that you finally have my full attention, I’d almost pay you
to find out. Almost that is,” she says with a cute mock smile that usually
works wonders on the male gender but doesn’t seem to faze Forrest.
“Seriously, I’m willing to step back into the
attorney-client privilege relationship—off the clock, of course—if you want to
confide in me. Goes without saying, I’ll keep the information confidential.”
“I’m tempted to tell you, Olivia. It’s not something I’d ever feel com-fortable talking about with a man, or not even with many women for that matter. But you’re smart and you’re insightful and a good enough friend, I think, to put yourself in my place and see all the complexities from my point of view.
“Sure you want to hear this?”
“Truthfully, Forrest, I’m damned eager. Talk all you
want. I’m turn-ing off my phones, and I promise I’ll keep my mouth shut until
you make it crystal clear you want to hear from me. Cross my heart.”
“OK, Olivia,” Forrest begins, a troubled expression
overtaking the features of his usually pleasant face. “It started with a
personal tragedy that happened when I was twenty-one. That put an abrupt end to
my daydreaming about the kind of life I wanted and forced me to face the hard
fact that a person makes his or her own future.
“So, I set a goal of earning as much money as I could
as fast as I could, and I dedicated myself totally and solely to that end.
Believe me, the road I’ve traveled all these years is paved with money. Nothing
else.”
Judging a look of earnest interest from Olivia,
Forrest plunges on while the gate to his secret past is still ajar. “In the
twenty-three years since then, I’ve become enormously wealthy. But you know all
of that. All of my finances are recorded in your company’s books.
“You know I made my fortune in Chicago real estate by
buying and selling so many expensive houses and high-rise buildings that I
can’t remember half of them. And I invested almost everything I cleared. Spent
damned little on myself, such as places to live, cars, clothes, vacations—any
of the things rich people usually splurge on.
“Anyway, a couple of years ago, I decided I had made
more than enough money to let me liquidate a bunch of my holdings, move back
home and buy that mansion I’ve been set on having all these years.
“I kept that decision to myself, and, honestly, that was a hard thing to do because the time between then and now has dragged out like the poky period between Thanksgiving and Christmas does when you’re a kid. But, finally, with the phone call you made to John Vermillion this morn-ing, my goal is in sight, and I’m itching to get it done.”
“Forrest, I know I promised just to
listen, but you seem to have for-gotten I have no clue what ‘The Tragedy’ is.
How do you expect me to understand until you tell me what happened to get all
this started? And you haven’t told me whether you know for sure that old
mansion is even still there.”
“You’re right; I’m presuming too much. Sorry. Let me
explain it this way. I have my own reasons for not knowing for sure whether it’s
still standing or it’s a pile of bricks. I know how weird that sounds, but the
truth is I did not want to know because that would have taken away the second
biggest driving force I had for building my fortune. The other reason is the
tragedy—the most tormenting experience in my life, and an even bigger
motivator.
“You see, I haven’t been back to my hometown since
right after I graduated from college. My family moved to the West Coast during
my junior year, and the last time I was in Asher Heights was to get married.
“Yeah, Olivia, you can shut your mouth now and get
that shocked look off your face. You heard right; I did say married. Hard to
believe coming from a middle-aged bachelor who runs like hell anytime any woman
even hints she is romantically interested.”
“As if I didn’t know!” Olivia wanted to say out loud
but clamped down on her tongue.
“Anyway, Maggie McDaniel Mullens and I had been
engaged unoffi-cially since high school and officially since the Christmas
before I finished college. She was gorgeous, Olivia, and sexy as hell. I was so
hopelessly, helplessly, achingly in love with her, it was like being hooked on
a narcotic.
“She came from a good family, too, although I was a little put off by her somewhat goofy mother who had a bunch of silly hangups like giving all of her children names that started with the same letter: Maggie McDaniel, Mason McGeorge, and Millicent Marie. All of their clothes had three capital M’s monogrammed glaringly on them, and her mother couldn’t understand why each of my names, Forrest Walker Alderson, started with a different letter. I told her to blame it on my parents who apparently liked trees.
“I hadn’t seen much of Maggie and her family during my
final Spring semester. I was too busy trying to graduate with honors while
working part time and sending out resumes to companies I hoped would hire me.
Maggie already had graduated from another university in December and was busy
planning our wedding . . . .”
When his voice unexpectedly breaks, betraying the
matter-of-fact manner in which he was forcing himself to tell his tale, he
hesitates, coughs a couple of times, struggling to regain control.
After an embarrassing interval, he manages to
continue. “Or so I be-lieved. Until exactly one week before the wedding when
she abruptly threw me over and, like some kind of traitor, deserted me and our
plans for a future together. We’d already sent out invitations, made all the arrangements,
and spent a lot a of non-refundable money.
“Worse, everyone in town including all my boyhood and
college friends and their families became aware of the scandalous details.
Believe me, Olivia, it would have been kinder of Maggie if she had shot bullets
into me instead of words that permanently scarred my heart and screwed me up
where romance is concerned.”
“Oh, I am so very sorry, Forrest,” Olivia interjects,
unable to keep herself from interrupting, but gaining some insight into why he
has never acted on her implied advances.
“I don’t want you to be sorry, Olivia. I want you to
understand.
“Maggie’s reason enraged even her own family and deeply embar-rassed them before the entire community. The hell of it is, Maggie didn’t simply get cold feet; she tossed me aside for one of those edgy bad-boy types so many otherwise sensible females at one time or another in their lives go nuts over; intoxicated, I suppose, by their misguided notions of sex appeal and excited by the potential danger these no-goods represent. But foolishly blind to these perpetual adolescents’ lack of responsibility, ambition, and conscience.
“LeRoy Bottoms, that dimwit Maggie fell for, dropped
out of school so unscathed by education he couldn’t tell a double negative in a
sentence from a double dribble on a basketball court. His underfed brain was so
empty, he couldn’t form a sentence that didn’t start with ‘OK’ and end with
‘yuh know what I’m sayin’?’ ”
Forrest shakes his head like a dog flinging water off
its coat, appar-ently still unable to grasp why Maggie, or any other female
with a lick of sense, could fall for such a loser.
“Some gullible females, like Maggie, even marry these
predators,” Forrest says with palpable bitterness. “More often than not after
becom-ing pregnant, as she did. About which time, Mr. Edgy loses interest and
preys on some other dreamy-eyed female convinced beyond all reason he loves only
her, and she is The One who can change him.”
“Did you confront them?” Olivia interrupts.
“Hell no. She made it clear there was nothing I could
do to change her mind. So, I slinked out of Asher Heights after dark that same
night and never looked back. Never went back. Not even for a high school class
reunion. I cut off contact with everyone, including my lifelong best friends.
“Olivia, can you understand it wasn’t simply that I
was embarrassed; I was so heartsick and humiliated, I seriously considered
suicide. Or murder. Or both.
“I truly believed for a time I’d go crazy trying to force out of my mind the vision of my Maggie eagerly giving her beautiful body to someone so undeserving and so unappreciative. That image was—and all these years later remains—torturous.”
Olivia’s disciplined attention is
redirected by a couple of tears that manage to escape her eyes, slowly
trickling past her mouth before she can turn sideways and wipe them away.
Fortunately, Forrest doesn’t see them. The shame he has felt all these years
has kept him from looking directly at Olivia.
“But somehow, after agonizing for several days, I
managed to create a purpose for going on. I convinced myself I would live to
someday show Maggie she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. Call it
revenge; call it getting even; call it whatever you like. I just knew I wanted
Maggie to feel the depth of suffering she put me through.
“How? I did not know. When? I had no clue. But
sometime.
“To this day, as you know, Olivia, I have never
married. No woman, I am convinced, is worth the risk of going through such
excruciating pain again. Instead, I substituted work for love. That’s all I
existed for. I lived cheaply and invested my money wisely. Extraordinarily
wisely, I can say now without boasting.”
Olivia does know how he has lived. And for the first
time, she is be-ginning to understand why.
“Except for a little hiking by myself on weekends, all
I did was work. But my work and my investments paid off. And, by damn, I made
it big. After all those years dedicated almost exclusively to making money, I’m
worth millions upon millions!
“I think I can go back home almost anonymously now
because I doubt anyone in Asher Heights knows anything about my adult life or
my wealth. Why should they? Not even my parents and my two siblings suspect I
have more than a few million dollars, although I’ve treated them very
generously.”
“If you’ve treated them so ‘generously,’ ” Olivia silently asks herself, “why haven’t they somehow intervened in your lonely, tortured life? Guess you wouldn’t let them,” she concedes.
“Chances are no one in my hometown
will even recognize me. After all, I’m middle-aged, what used to be my dark
brown hair is at least half gray, and, as you can see, I’ve recently grown a
short beard, and I like it. On top of that, I’ve bought an old Chevrolet sedan
no one would look at twice. I’m betting nobody will notice me.
“So, until I have John Vermillion working through you
to purchase the mansion for me, I’ll be incognito in Asher Heights. By then, my
investigators and I should have discovered everything I want to know: Who’s
who, who’s where, and who’s doing what. Including Maggie McDaniel Mullens
whatever-the-hell-her-last-name-is-now.”
“Oh, Forrest, what a perfectly horrid experience. I
mean, I’ve been through a divorce and a couple of other painful breakups in my
time, but nothing that affected me like yours has. But, please, because you’ve
trusted me enough to confide in me, I’ll intrude on your privacy just enough to
ask you a couple of questions I pray you’ve already carefully considered.”
“Go ahead, Olivia. I’d like to know what you’re
thinking.”
“First, Forrest, are you willing to spend perhaps
several million dol-lars to buy and restore that old mansion because you really
want to live in it? Or is it because you want to rub your great wealth and
success in Maggie’s face and show her what a terrible mistake she made? If
revenge is your reason, I fear for you, my friend. I truly do.”
“Obvious questions, Olivia, and of course, I’ve
considered them. Many times. The raw truth is I do not know for sure. I’m aware
of the possible consequences and all that. But it’s something I’ve got to do,
and I’ll only find out the truth by actually doing it.”
“Then God go with you,” Olivia says,
rising from her chair and sur-prising Forrest with a hug so intimate that even
he couldn’t mistake its meaning.
His textbook/resource book, Media Writer’s Handbook, a Guide to Common Writing and Editing Problems, is in its seventh edition and third decade of continuous publication. It has been purchased at more than 300 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad.
Dr. Arnold is the author of more than 50 professional and academic articles and has written a short story, One Minute Past Christmas, and two novels, Wyandotte Bound, and Old Mrs. Kimble’s Mansion.
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