Time After Time Read online

  Description

  USA TODAY bestselling author Antoinette Stockenberg spins love, family, and a touch of magic into a lighthearted, richly drawn tale that tugs at the heart and leaves the reader laughing and wanting more. Time After Time will appeal to fans of authors as diverse as Nora Roberts, Barbara Michaels, Jennifer Crusie and Barbara Freethy.

  WHEN A PARTY PLANNER MEETS A PARTY POOPER ...

  things will probably not turn out the way either would like. Liz Coppersmith hopes to move beyond kids' parties at Chuck E. Cheese to planning premier events among the upper crust in Newport, Rhode Island. Her first upscale client is confirmed bachelor Jack Eastman, who's struggling to keep the family empire afloat and would be just fine with Chuck E. Cheese. More problematic for Jack are an untrained puppy, two illegitimate toddlers, a runaway mother and an aging Lothario father. Liz's problems are simpler: an historic mystery, an amnesiac friend, a thief on the loose and a recurring apparition that may or may not be her imagination.

  Reviews

  "Master storyteller Antoinette Stockenberg surpasses herself with her newest tale, Time After Time ... a richly rewarding novel filled with wrenching loss, timeless passion and eerie suspense. A novel to be savored."

  --Romantic Times

  "All of the elements of a rollicking great read have been expertly blended into this story, from precocious children to an old skirt-chasing lech. Time After Time, as hilarious as it is poignant and heart-tugging, will command center stage on your keeper shelf. Once again, Antoinette Stockenberg has done a magnificent job."

  --I'll Take Romance

  "Antoinette Stockenberg is a superb contemporary writer, an author who creates an ambience that is as important as the character development. She also adds an invaluable sense of humor which appears at unexpected times, leaving readers loudly laughing. Time After Time is that rarest of works -- a satisfying treasure for a vast variety of palates."

  --Affaire de Coeur

  "This book [is] a rewarding and gratifying reading experience. This exceptionally talented author has penned a unique story that spins a touching and sensitive story of love and trust. Throw in a cast of magnificent characters, and you'll be ready to hold on to this one for another read."

  --Rendezvous

  "A light and engaging tale of righting past wrongs in class-conscious Newport society."

  --Gothic Journal

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  Visit http://www.antoinettestockenberg.com to read sample chapters of other novels coming soon for your Kindle.

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Time After Time

  Copyright © 1995 by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedication

  For Diane

  Acknowledgments

  My gratitude to the following for their helpful input: Dr. Howard Browne (as always) and Dr. Samir Moubayed; Mike Muessel of Oldport Marine; Seaman David Parry; Newport Officer Teresa Hayes; Vicki Lawrence; and especially my sister Diane, whose kids had better remember all those birthday extravaganzas.

  Jane, thanks for the copper beech and the view.

  Chapter 1

  Liz Coppersmith and her friend Victoria raised their wineglasses to the brooding mansion on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  "Not a bad neighborhood," said Victoria, the taller, more whimsically dressed of the two. She dropped into a plastic lawn chair, shook out her red permed curls, and straightened the folds of her star-print sundress. "You'll do lots of business over there," she predicted, "or my name's not Victoria."

  Liz had heard her say "or my name's not Victoria" a thousand times since they'd met five years ago in a grief-management group. And every time, Liz had to resist saying, "Your name isn't Victoria, damn it." Victoria's name was Judy Maroney, and if it weren't for her stubborn, persistent, rather amazing amnesia, Liz would be calling her Judy and not Tori at that very moment.

  "If I do get any work out of them, Tori, it'll be thanks to you. You found me a house in a perfect location."

  "I did, didn't I?" said Victoria, pleased with herself. "Call it intuition, but I was sure you'd like it, despite that unpromising ad in the paper. I mean — a four-room house? I have more bathrooms than that, and I live alone."

  They both glanced back at the sweet but plain two-story cottage that now belonged to Liz. It was exactly the kind of house that children invariably draw; all that was missing was a plume of Crayola smoke from the red-brick chimney.

  "It's no castle," Liz conceded. She tilted her head toward the intimidating mansion to the east. "But what the heck," she said with an ironic smile. "It's close enough."

  She went back to gazing through the chain-link fence at her neighbor. The grounds of the estate were magnificent, even for Newport. Ancient trees, presided over by an enormous copper beech, threw shimmering pools of shade over an expanse of well-kept grass. In the sunny openings between the trees were huge, wonderful shrubs — viburnums and hydrangeas and lush, towering rhododendrons. There were no flowers to speak of; only a green, understated elegance. It was like having her own private deer park — except without the deer — right in the heart of Newport.

  Too bad she was separated from it by a chain-link fence and barbed wire.

  Liz reached up and plucked a strand of the rusty wire as if it were a harp string. "This has been here a long time," she said.

  "If I were you," said Victoria, "I'd think about getting a tetanus shot." She frowned in disapproval. "Barbed wire. Who do they think they are, anyway?"

  "You mean, who do they think we are," Liz corrected. "Obviously they don't trust my side of the neighborhood." She took in her tiny cottage, the smallest house on a street of small houses. "And let's face it, why should they? We don't exactly radiate wealth and prosperity."

  "Neve
r mind," said Victoria with an airy wave of her hand. "That will come. It's your karma. I had a vision."

  Liz laughed and said, "You and your crystal ball just might be right. After all, yesterday — the very day I moved in! — there I was, talking through this fence to their housekeeper. I suppose they sent her over here to make sure I wasn't in some prison-release program, but I liked her, even if she was a spy. Her name is Netta something, and she was as chatty as could be. Apparently her boss is some workaholic bachelor —"

  "Uh-oh. No business there," said Victoria, sipping her wine.

  "That's what I thought, too, at first." Liz raked her hair away from her face and cocked her head appraisingly at the Queen Anne-style mansion.

  "But then I found out that his parents stay at the estate — East Gate, it's called — every summer. It's been in the family since it was built, a hundred years ago. Besides the parents, there are a couple of semi-permanent guests staying there now as well. They must do some entertaining." Liz smiled and said, "Naturally I found a way to let it drop that I was an events planner."

  "Did the housekeeper even know what that was?" asked Victoria.

  "I made sure of it. I told her I design weddings, dinners, birthdays, dances, receptions, fund-raisers, charity events — the works."

  "In other words —"

  "I lied." Liz's deep brown eyes flashed with good humor. "Hey, if I told her I arranged kids' birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese, you think she'd have been impressed?"

  "You did what you had to do, Liz Coppersmith," agreed Victoria. "You planted the seed."

  "Yeah. That was the easy part. The hard part will be to provide references who're old enough to read and write."

  Victoria said, "If you need references, don't worry. I'll come up with references."

  And she would, too, because — unlike Liz — Victoria had money to buy anything she wanted.

  It wasn't always that way. Less than six years earlier, Victoria —Judy Maroney then — had crossed the Rhode Island border with her husband, two children, and not much more than high hopes that her husband's new job at the Newport Tourist and Convention Center would give her family more stability than he had at his old job in the defense industry. The family was eastbound on Route 95, just a few miles behind their moving van, when they were sideswiped by a drunk driver and ended up broadside to two lanes of eastbound traffic.

  Judy's husband, Paul, and their four-year-old son were killed instantly. Their daughter, Jessica, who would've been two in a week, had lived another forty-eight hours. Judy Maroney, behind the wheel, was saved, just barely, by the driver's-side airbag.

  And she could not forgive herself, both for being at the wheel and for surviving. That, at least, became Liz's theory. How else to explain the post-trauma amnesia that had no medical basis?

  Judy's mother-in-law, to whom Liz had once spoken, had a different theory. She believed that Judy, rejecting the unspeakable horror of her loss, had invented a new identity to get around having to face that abyss. Hence the single — and now legal — name "Victoria."

  Whatever the reason, Judy Maroney had for all practical purposes died in that crash. And the woman who replaced her — Victoria — had never once, to Liz or to anyone else, alluded to the accident. Tori was pleasant, she was friendly — by far the most cheerful member in the grief group — and she was totally amnesiac.

  The accident had resulted in a huge settlement for her. Money hadn't given Judy back her memory — it certainly hadn't given her back her family — but it had given the woman named Victoria lots of people willing to call themselves friends. Or references. Or whatever she wanted.

  "Hey, you," said Victoria behind her. "Have you heard a word I said?"

  Victoria had an almost spooky knack for knowing when Liz was focusing on her amnesia. Liz was forced to back up mentally, searching her brain for the last of her friend's lighthearted babble. "Of course I heard. You think I should give my house a name."

  "I really do. Houses sound more important when they have names. How about 'West Gate'? Or 'Harborview'? Or — I'm quoting you, now — 'Bigenuf'?"

  "I was talking about the mortgage, not the house," Liz said, laughing. She set her wineglass on a nearby stepstone and turned her attention yet again to the imposing mansion to the east. Since yesterday, it had held her in its thrall.

  Privilege. Tradition. Wealth. Elegance. Lineage. It was all there, on the other side of the barbed wire. Everything about it was the opposite of her own life. Liz had been born and raised in Newport's Fifth Ward, a working-class neighborhood of mostly Irish families that — until the yuppies began moving in recently — had changed little over the past century. Privilege in the Fifth Ward meant getting a parking place in front of your own house; tradition meant meeting with the same people every Friday night for a game of cards.

  "Do you think I'm being too ambitious?" she suddenly asked Victoria. "Do you think I should work my way up through the Point and the Hill before I go after East Gate and the rest of the Bellevue Avenue crowd?"

  "Heck, no," Victoria said cheerfully. "This is Newport! The town has a long tradition of society-crashing. Where would the Vanderbilts be if they'd taken some slow-but-sure route?"

  Liz turned to her friend with a wry look. "I'm not trying to break into society, Tori. I just want to be able to make a little money off it once in a while."

  Victoria came up to Liz and put her arm around her. "And so you shall. You'll make tons of money. And you and your little girl will live happily ever after in a big house of your own. If that's what you want."

  Together they gazed at the shingled and stuccoed Queen Anne style mansion, sun-washed and golden in the evening light. After a moment Victoria said, "Where is Susy, by the way? With your folks?"

  Liz nodded. "She's been feeling ignored, what with the flurry of moving and all. My parents have her overnight."

  "Lucky for you they live in town."

  "Isn't it, though?"

  Liz was very aware that her friend's own parents were dead. Even if they'd still been alive, Victoria wouldn't know them. The amnesia was so bizarre, so sad, so complete. When Liz met Victoria in the grief group, she herself was on the ropes emotionally. For a while she convinced herself that as she pulled out of her numb state, Victoria would, too. Then she realized that being left by a husband — even learning there'd be no more children— didn't come close to losing one's whole family in a car crash.

  "You're doing it again," said Victoria. "Drifting."

  "Sorry. Did I tell you that someone in the mansion has two kids?" asked Liz. "I saw them playing outside. There's a little blond girl who's my Susy's age; I think her name is Caroline. And there's a two-year-old boy that the housekeeper has to chase after every minute."

  "You're thinking they'll be playmates for Susy?"

  Liz's reaction was the dry laugh of a working-class townie with no illusions. "Not unless I attack this fence with cable-cutters." She turned and began walking back to her new little home, a cozy twenty feet away from where they stood.

  She added, "I just meant, with kids around, you're always celebrating something or other — baptisms, bar mitzvahs, birthdays, graduations, weddings. The kids could end up being my ticket to Bellevue Avenue. Besides," Liz said with a musing smile, "it'd be fun to do something for those two. They looked so sweet."

  ****

  Netta Simmons was on her hands and knees picking up pieces of a broken soup bowl when a plate of steamed vegetables went flying over her head, smashed up against the eighteenth-century inlaid sideboard, and came dribbling down the polished wood not far from where she knelt.

  That's it, the housekeeper decided, tossing the soup bowl pieces into a plastic pan. I quit. After thirty-eight years, to have to put up with this?

  Leaning on one knee for support, Netta got to her feet with a painful "oof" and turned to face her tormentor.

  "Caroline Stonebridge —" Netta began, her lips trembling in her jowly cheeks.

  "Caroline, sweeth
eart, that wasn't called for," said Cornelius Eastman from the head of the table. "You could have hurt Netta. Now, come — be a good girl and say you're sorry."

  The five-year-old blonde with the Shirley Temple curls turned her steel-blue gaze on Netta and said, "I'm sorry." Under her breath she muttered, "That I missed."

  Instinctively the housekeeper turned to Cornelius Eastman's son: handsome dark-haired Jack, him that she had practically raised from scratch, him that would've cut off his hand before he'd ever raise it to her in anger — with or without a plate in it.

  Jack Eastman stood up and threw his napkin on the table in disgust. "This is impossible, Dad!" he said angrily. "Send the brat to bed without supper — God knows she has no use for it."

  "Now, Jack —" his father began unhappily. "I know it's not easy for you. You couldn't have had this — situation — in mind when you took over East Gate. But what can we do? Caroline is a fact in my life, whether —"

  "I don't like broccoli," said little blond Caroline. "And Netta knows it."

  Netta saw Jack clench his jaw, a good sign. She folded her arms across her chest and waited with a kind of grim hope: maybe the son would overrule the father and lock the little monster in the carriage house for a year or two.

  But no. In a controlled voice Jack said to Caroline, "When and if we can bribe a new nanny to take care of you, you can go back to eating all the junk you want. Until then, you will eat whatever Netta prepares for the rest of us. If you ever throw one morsel of food again, you will eat in the kitchen, in a high chair, like your little brother. Now. Either finish your supper or go to your room."