Home To Eden

“I’ll tell you who she’s with. Bloody McClelland, that’s who. The arrogant bastard. Always thinking herself a cut above me. But she chose me, not him. Now she’s picked up with him right under your noses, the arctic bitch.”

“And where have you been all this time, Heath?” Her aunt’s voice cracks with contempt. “What do you get up to in Sydney apart from gambling? You’re never far from the racetrack or the casino. Do you think we don’t know that? You’re an addict. Gambling is a drug.”

“There’s more attraction in gambling than living here,” her father answers furiously. “The lot of you looking down on me. The Cavanagh black sheep. Always so chillingly polite, but you bloody hate me. You just don’t have the guts to say so. What is a man to do when his wife doesn’t return home? To be humiliated like this! I tell you she’s finally gone off with that bastard. He never stopped loving her.”

“What you’re saying is crazy!” Now her grandmother speaks with intensity. “Corrinne would never leave her child. She adores Nicole.”

“But she’s done it this time, hasn’t she, dear Louise?”

Nicole’s grandfather cuts in as though he’s reached breaking point. “Instead of your usual ranting, Heath, I’d be obliged if you’d focus on what might have happened to your wife. I very much fear an accident. Instead of wasting time, we should be organizing a search party. Corrinne has the Land Cruiser. It could have broken down somewhere.”

“In which case she’ll soon be home.” Her grandmother sounds to anyone who knows her achingly unsure. “Corrine is a loving mother. She would never abandon Nicole. Never.” She repeats it like a mantra.

A low growl issues from her father as if he’d momentarily turned feral. “Who are you trying to convince, Louise? Your beloved Corrinne is no more than a common whore. You realize you’re admitting she’s taken up with McClelland. She’d leave me, but never Nicole.”

“I have no idea,” her grandmother, so proud, lies. “You were the one who snatched her away from him, Heath. Almost on the eve of their wedding. To think I was the one who invited you here for Corrinne’s engagement party. You were kin, after all. A Cavanagh. I felt sorry for you. I felt the family was too hard on you. How you repaid us.” A wealth of misery and regret in her voice, she went on, “You broke up two families who’d been the best of friends. The Cavanaghs and the McClellands. We’ve been here since the earliest days of settlement. The Cavanaghs even before the McQueens. We all stood together in this vast wilderness in order to survive. Our families would have been united but for you. Do you think I’d be speaking like this if you were a good husband and father? But you’re not, are you. I know you’re still obsessed with Corrinne. I know the black jealousy that prowls around your brain and your heart. Your mad suspicions. You never let her alone. But you scarcely have time for your own daughter, Nicole.”

No hesitation. A thud like a hand slamming down on a table. “If she is my daughter,” her father snarls.

Chaos is easy to create. It takes so few words. Glued to the banister, Nicole has trouble breathing.

“She’s yours, all right.” Aunt Sigrid is all contempt—and something more. What?

Grandma’s quavery voice gives the impression she is on the verge of tears. “How can you say that, Heath?”

“Sorry. I need proof.” Her father laughs. Not a nice laugh. A laugh utterly devoid of humor.

Her grandfather intervenes, speaking with grave authority. “My daughter would never have married you knowing she was carrying David’s child.”

“Perhaps she didn’t know at the time.” Her father produces another sneering laugh followed by the sound of boots scraping on the parquet floor. “To hell with the lot of you! You all idolize Corrinne, but she’s a cruel bitch. God knows why she married me. It had little to do with love.”

“Lust more like it!” The words seemed ripped from Aunt Sigrid’s throat.

Another mirthless laugh. “I bet you’ve spent a lot of time weeping over what you’ve never had, Siggy.” Her father speaks as though his sister-in-law is trash, not one of the Cavanaghs of Eden. “I’ll get this search party started. I can do that much. My bet is we won’t find her. She’s gone off with McClelland at long last. And none of you could stop her.”

At that, twelve-year-old Nicole collapses on a step, starting to succumb to a great sickness inside her. “Please, God,” she begins to pray, “don’t let anything bad have happened to Mummy.”

“For God’s sake, Nicole, what are you doing there?” Her father unleashes another roar, striding out into the hallway only to see her hunched up on the stairs. “Answer me, girl.”

No answer. No point. Not anymore. He isn’t her father.

“Leave the child alone, Heath.” The iron command in her grandfather’s voice then changes to tender, protective. “Nicole, darling, go back to bed. There’s nothing for you to worry about. Go, sweetheart.”

Go? When her mother is out there somewhere in the desert? “I’d rather go look for Mummy.” Nicole finds the strength to pull herself up, though her legs are wobbly with shock. “Please, Granddad, may I go with you?” She cannot bring herself to address the man, Heath, standing tall, staring up at her with his black eyes. Probably seeing her mother. Doesn’t everyone say she’s her mother’s mirror image?

Grandma rushes into the entrance hall, crushing one of her beautiful lace handkerchiefs to her mouth. “No, Giles!”

“There may be comfort in it for the child.” Sir Giles draws his wife tenderly into his arms.

“I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the secretive little bitch knows where her mother is.” Heath Cavanagh spits anger and venom. Definitely not Daddy anymore. “Corrinne takes her everywhere. Tells her everything. Where’s your mother, girl?” he thunders.

In a flash, the secret forces within Nicole gather. It’s as though she can see through her mother’s sightless eyes. Searing whiteness. Nothing.

“Gone forever,” she says.

CHAPTER ONE

NICOLE WAS NEARLY twenty minutes late arriving at the Bradshaws’ splendid East Side apartment, although, Carol had confided earlier, she was the guest of honor. Today was her twenty-sixth birthday and Carol had arranged one of her “little dinner parties,” which usually turned out to be sumptuous affairs with glamorous and often famous people in attendance and “someone special” for her to meet. Carol, who had all but adopted her as the granddaughter she’d never had, was determined to find her the right husband and thus keep her in New York, or at the very least within easy traveling distance. That didn’t include far-off Australia, the home of her birth. The Outback was worlds away from New York, the fabulous hub of the New World.

The Bradshaws had taken her under their wing almost from the time she’d arrived in New York two years before, fresh from a three-year stint in Paris where she’d been living and studying painting. As fate would have it, the Bradshaws were visiting a SoHo art gallery the same afternoon Nicole took shelter there. The rain was coming down in buckets with intermittent booms of thunder. As she’d removed her head scarf, Carol Bradshaw, standing nearby, had burst out with, “What lovely hair! Like a glass of fine wine held up to the light.”

From that chance meeting a genuine, mutually rewarding friendship had evolved. The Bradshaws had lost their only child, a brilliant young man with the expectation of a full life ahead of him, to a freak skiing accident when he was about Nicole’s age; now stepping in to fill that gap was Nicole, a young woman reared in the isolated Australian Outback but severed from her country by a family trauma about which she hardly spoke.

Just once in the early days did Nicole confide in Carol about her mother’s tragic death, saying only that she was killed in a car accident when Nicole was twelve. She never divulged that the accident was on her family’s huge historic cattle station. She never said it was she who had led her poor grandfather, now dead from shock and grief, to the four-wheel drive at the bottom of Shadow Valley; she who first sighted the bodies in the sizzling heat. Her beautiful mother thrown clear of the wreckage, body splayed over an enormous boulder, sightless eyes turned up to the scorching sun; the man’s body still behind the wheel of the vehicle, windshield smashed, blood all over his face, just as dead. The man was David McClelland, whom her mother had jilted, on the eve of their wedding to marry Heath Cavanagh, a distant cousin and the black sheep of the family.

So many lives ruined all in the name of love!

The coronial inquest had brought in an open finding, leaving both families to endure years and years of cruel speculation, not the least of it the tricky question: who was Nicole Cavanagh’s real father? Everyone knew about the old love triangle, comprising Corrinne Cavanagh and the two young men who’d loved and fought over her. Inevitably doubts about Nicole’s paternity were sown. Rumor had it the victims of the accident may have been arguing—which was likely, given the highly explosive situation that promised to get worse. Corrinne may have made a grab for the wheel, causing McClelland to lose control of the vehicle. The vehicle went over the escarpment plunging to the floor of Shadow Valley. Heath Cavanagh’s account of his movements was accepted—one of Eden’s stockmen vouched for him in any case—but the enmity between Heath and David was legendary. Two neighboring pioneer families, once the greatest friends, had been estranged for several years after Corrinne had jilted her fiancé, David McClelland. Somehow the families had patched it up in a fashion to accommodate Nicole, who was the innocent victim of all this unhappiness. This allowed her to form a deep attachment to the young scion of the McClelland family, Drake. But the early estrangement was nothing compared to the bitter war that broke out after the tragedy.

Without the evidence to prove it, everyone in Koomera Crossing and the outlying cattle stations held Heath Cavanagh responsible, as though he were a demon capable of being in two places at one time. Either that, or it had been a murder-suicide, which no one wanted to believe. Nevertheless no one was really satisfied with the theory of death by misadventure. As a result the speculation continued to run wild.

Nicole told her American friends none of this. Like her, they’d known family tragedy, but not so much as a whiff of scandal had touched their respected name. In the Bradshaws, Nicole saw two handsome, aristocratic people in their mid-sixties who were friends when she truly needed them, alone as she was in another country. They became like family to her.

It was the Bradshaws who had found her her light-filled SoHo loft with its vast industrial windows. The Bradshaws who had introduced her to their wide circle of friends, a good many with sons and daughters her own age. When the Bradshaws saw her paintings, they’d insisted on helping her to get them shown. Through his contacts, Howard Bradshaw had even engineered her TV appearance that afternoon. Brief but important. She’d been introduced as a “sunny, up-and-coming young Aussie artist.” As near-perfect a misnomer as Nicole could think of, for her background was too full of black trauma. One day she reasoned she would confide in Carol fully, but not yet. The past was too close. Too filled with grief. Grief was the worst illness of all.

Carol came to the door to greet her, her face warm and welcoming, shining with pleasure.

“Nikki, dear!” They kissed. Not air kisses, but real displays of affection.

“So sorry I’m late. Traffic, forgive me.”

“Of course. You’re here. We watched your guest spot. You came over wonderfully well. So beautiful and articulate. Howard and I are proud of you.”

“It would never have happened without you and Howard,” Nicole said, smiling, then arm in arm with Carol accompanying her across the spacious and sumptuous entrance hall. A magnificent neoclassical parcel gilt console stood along one wall, overhung by an equally magnificent black lacquer and gilt mirror with two antique English gilt figurine lamps to either side of an exquisite flower arrangement. The Bradshaws were wealthy on a scale that made her own family’s fortune modest by comparison. She could see the elegantly dressed people gathered in the living room, which Carol had recently had made over—God knows why, for it had been beautiful before. Several heads were already turned in their direction. A little knot of people broke up, parting to either side.

Shock sucked the breath from her lungs as she felt the color drain from her cheeks. She put out one hand, then the other. Her mother was staring at her intently from across the Bradshaws’ opulent living room. The most marvelous apparition, astonishingly young and beautiful, a half smile caught on her mouth, her whirling auburn hair floating around her bare white shoulders.

The long years were as nothing. Yesterday. Whoever said time heals all wounds? Someone incapable of great depths of emotion. True love is eternal. Unchanging. It endures beyond death.

The apparition was very slender and delicate, like a fine piece of porcelain. She was wearing Nicole’s favorite color—violet-blue—with an all-over glitter of silver. A beautiful, feminine gown. Shimmering, light as air. Romantic.

Just like hers.

Rapture drained away as pain and despair flooded in. The long wall facing her, she saw now, was set with tall mirrored panels to reflect the chandeliers, the museum-quality antiques and the paintings. There was no apparition. She’d had no miraculous acquisition of psychic powers. How ridiculous to think so.

What she’d seen was her own reflection. An outwardly composed, inwardly disturbed young woman. One who had suffered a shocking childhood trauma and had never broken free of its horror. All those years of therapy, futile. There was no hiding place from grief. The memory of her beautiful mother still held her in its spell. She wanted her back so badly she was capable of unconsciously conjuring her up.

“Nikki, darling, whatever is the matter?” Carol held her arm, gazing at her in dismay. “You’re not ill, are you?”