“He said his name was James Bigelow and that he needed a room for the next several nights, as he had business in the area. He told me he was a land surveyor and that San Rafaela and all the other nearby towns were being considered by wealthy investors for commercial development. The Loralei was central to all the places he needed to see. I gave him a room. My nicest one.”
“How long did he stay?”
“Four nights.”
“And how did he seem around your other guests?”
“I didn’t have other guests. He was polite to me. Kind. He fixed a wobbly door hinge that I had been meaning to tell Elliot about without my even asking. And he was so easy to talk to. When I served James his supper I would sit with him. He said he enjoyed having someone to talk to while he ate. I enjoyed it, too. He asked me how long I had lived there and I told him that I’d been born at the Loralei, that my mother had died of an illness when I was still a baby and I’d only recently lost my father. He kept asking questions that no one ever asks me anymore, because everyone in San Rafaela knows all the answers. I... I thought he was genuinely wanting to get to know me.”
She pauses a moment and I find myself baffled that the way in which Martin snared Belinda is so very different from the way he snared me. He’d never seemed interested in knowing me better. Not for a moment. It is as if Belinda is describing a different man altogether. A chameleon. But then again, Martin hadn’t needed to woo me. He hadn’t needed anything from me other than my willingness to marry him, and that had been so easily attained. Stunningly easy. “What other kinds of questions did he ask you?” I say.
Belinda turns to face me. “About my family. The property. At first I thought maybe he was trying to see if I would consider selling the Loralei. I told him I wouldn’t, but he said he was interested in knowing why my family chose San Rafaela to make a home. He said knowing the reason would help him advise the investors.”
“And so what did you tell him?”
“That my grandparents came out to California when my fatherwas just a boy, during the last year of the gold rush. My grandfather bought the property to build the inn because it was situated on the road to San Francisco and because there was an old mine at the far end that someone had long ago staked a claim upon but which had never yielded anything. My grandfather liked the novelty of that.”
My ears prick at this. “A gold mine? There’s a gold mine on this property?”
“It’s abandoned, though. There’s no gold in it. My grandfather and father poked about in it for years. They never found anything. And no one goes in it anymore. My father died in that mine. I hate it. I’ve always hated it. It was always dark and cold and full of bats. I thought the mine was dangerous. And in the end, it was. I was at the entrance when my father died; he’d wanted to show me something inside it and I didn’t want to go in. I heard him cry out when he stumbled and fell. I will never forget that sound.”
“And you told Martin all of this?”
“He is not Martin to me.”
I say nothing and after a moment Belinda continues.
“He told me things about himself, too. It wasn’t just me doing all the talking. He told me about life in San Francisco, where he had a room at a boardinghouse, about all the theaters and museums and restaurants. He told me that, even though he loved the city, he grew up on a cattle ranch in Colorado and that he missed it.”
“Wait. He told you his parents had a cattle ranch?”
“Yes. Why?”
“He told me his parents were killed in a carriage accident back east when he was six, and that the aunt and uncle who took himin were cruel to him. He said it was a cattle rancher in Colorado who’d given him his first job and changed his life.”
“Which story is true?” Belinda asks, though surely she doesn’t think I know the answer. Either tale could be true. Or neither.
“It doesn’t matter right now,” I reply. “What else did he say about his family?”
“That his mother died of influenza when he was eighteen, and an older sister died in a riding accident the following year. His father passed away not long after that of a heart attack. He told me he sold the family ranch and moved to California to start a new life.”
We are both quiet for a moment as our tea grows cool and we ponder what we thought was true of the man we’d married, and what are likely lies.
“How much time passed before he came to the inn again?” I finally ask.
“A week.”
“Did you know he would be coming back?”
“He didn’t say that first time, but I wanted him to come back. I missed him the minute he was gone. Each time he left I missed him more. By the sixth visit I knew I was in love with him. He seemed such an attentive, charming person. He knew how to coax my worries out and what to say to get me to laugh. Elliot had always been able to do this, too, but somehow with James, it was different. When he proposed after only three months, I said yes.”
“And you... felt loved by him?” I ask, because I can’t picture it. I can’t picture Martin kissing Belinda, making her laugh, making her feel wanted—all behaviors I believed him incapable of because of his crippling grief over losing Candace.
“I did,” Belinda says, but then a shadow seems to fall acrossher face. “In the beginning, anyway. But soon after we married I began to hope James would want a job that allowed him to be at home every night. I missed him when he was gone and wanted to believe he missed me. I thought the open road would loosen its hold on him, especially when I told him that I was expecting.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
Belinda shakes her head. “When I told him I wanted him to find a job closer to home, he said that he liked the job he had. There was nothing about our situation that needed fixing. He said I knew what he did for a living when I married him, and that I fell in love with him when he was living that kind of life. I’d been happy then. I could be happy now if I wanted to be. I was choosing to be unhappy about it.”
