Keys to the Castle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Long Ago and Far Away

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  In the Land of Make-Believe

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  Fairy-Tale Endings

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  Happily Ever After

  Praise for the novels of Donna Ball

  “A major talent of the genre.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Ball] knows how to keep a tale moving.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Donna Ball has created a delightful world in her Ladybug Farm novels. Her characters are lively and endearing, and readers will feel a longing to join the girls on the front porch in the evenings as they reminisce about the day’s activities.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A must-read.”

  —Examiner.com

  Berkley Books by Donna Ball

  A YEAR ON LADYBUG FARM

  AT HOME ON LADYBUG FARM

  LOVE LETTERS FROM LADYBUG FARM

  KEYS TO THE CASTLE

  A BERKLEY BOOK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of the Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Donna Ball

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ball, Donna.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47831-8

  3. Life change events—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A4545K49 2011

  813’.54—dc22 2010030818

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Long Ago and Far Away

  ONE

  When she closed her eyes, her dreams were of summer seas and the call of gulls, and the sound of someone’s laughter . . . laughter, which, each time she dreamed of it, seemed to grow farther away and more indistinct until sometimes she couldn’t be sure whether it wasn’t, in fact, nothing more than the cry of the gulls. Sometimes she would close her eyes and try desperately to bring those dreams to mind: the sound of laughter, the taste of salt and sunshine, days so blue they could make your eyes ache. The feeling of being utterly, wantonly, outrageously loved.

  When she opened her eyes, the ocean was gray and the wind was biting and all she saw was the worry in her sister Dixie’s eyes. It was an expression Sara had seen far too much of over the past year, and she hated herself for having put it there.

  “Sara?” prompted Dixie, her short legs struggling to keep up with Sara’s long stride across the damp sand. “Are you listening?”

  The two sisters could not have been more dissimilar. Sara, with her long legs and windblown mahogany hair, had a figure that was made for skinny jeans and haute couture. She had turned forty-six last year, and even though the winter had left her heart-shaped face pale and pinched and had leached too much of the joy from her blue gray eyes, the resulting fragility seemed almost to have subtracted years, not added them.

  Dixie was short and round and three years younger than her sister. A lifetime of ocean air and beach sun had bleached her bouncy yellow curls and added color to her face that even the gray winters of the Outer Banks couldn’t strip away. She was mother to twin four-year-old boys, wife to a good and solid man, and owner of a thriving downtown business. Most people, seeing the two women together, would have guessed that Dixie was the older sister.

  “Sara?” she repeated now, taking a single running step to close the ground between them.

  “Right.” Sara shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her oversized gray sweater—Daniel’s sweater—and wished she had worn a scarf. “Three p.m. flight out of Charlotte, connections in Atlanta. Next stop Paris.”

  “You don’t have to sound so excited about it. And could you slow down? You’re not walking there, you know!”

  Sara dredged up a grimace of a smile, and she slowed her pace. “Sorry. I just don’t see why this all couldn’t be done via e-mail. Good God, I’ve handled multimillion-dollar contracts by e-mail. Why the French government can’t manage to settle one man’s pathetic little estate without dragging me across an ocean . . .”

  “I thought you said it had something to do with the house, and the property taxes, and it’s not as though a trip to the French countryside in the spring is a punishment, you know.”

  The wind whipped Sara’s hair across her face, and she combed it back with her fingers distractedly. “I don’t know. The trip sounded like a good idea when I booked it, but now . . .” She gave a brief, bracing shake of her head, and her hair flew into her eyes again. “Sorry. I guess this gray weather has got me down. It’s depressing, isn’t it?”

  The ocean rumbled behind them, and the wind sent rivulets of dark sand scurrying across the deserted beach. The sky overhead was the color of lead, with darker clouds banking to the north. It had been a long ugly winter, and this day, this sky, seemed to epitomize all of it.

  Dixie’s smile was as bright and bouncy as the curls that peeked from beneath her stocking cap, and a good deal more genuine than Sara’s. She replied, “In the Outer Banks of North Carolina, maybe. But in the French countryside, I hear the weather is gorgeous! It’s going to be a wonderful trip. You’re going to drink fabulous wines and eat French food and take tons of pictures of churches and châteaux and sunflowers. Sara, you deserve this. Please try to enjoy it.”

  Sara stopped walking suddenly and turned on her sister. The buffeting sea winds tore at her dark hair again and she caught it wildly between both hands. “It’s not a vacation, okay?” She could not believe the voice that came out of her mouth, raised and shrill over the crash and mutter
of the waves, was her own. “I’m flying across an ocean to settle the estate of a husband I barely knew, and I don’t deserve it, okay? I didn’t deserve to meet Daniel, I didn’t deserve for him to die, and I for damn sure don’t deserve that stupid house in a country where I don’t even speak the language. Stop trying to make this fun for me, Dixie, could you just do that? It’s not going to be fun!”

  Her sister endured the onslaught patiently, as she always did. Her eyes were filled with compassion, her wind-chapped face softened with understanding. She was the caretaker, the comforter, the patient, sympathetic friend. It was a role she had had to play all too often since Sara had come back to Little John Island almost a year ago, and life had changed for all of them.

  She said gently, “You know you need to do this, Sara. You know you need to say good-bye.”

  Sara drew in a breath for another sharp reply, a dozen angry retorts bubbling to her lips. How could she say good-bye to a place she had never been, a man who did not belong there? What was there to say good-bye to? Daniel wasn’t there. Daniel was here, on this island, in her memories, in her heart. Lawyers weren’t going to change that. Signed papers weren’t going to change that. And flying to Europe for damn sure wasn’t going to change it.

  And neither was screaming at her sister on a beach in North Carolina three thousand miles away. Sara released her breath, closed her lips, and started walking again.

  Dixie slipped her arm through her sister’s in easy, companionable comfort. “Jeff said he’ll be glad to drive you to the airport,” she said. “There’s no need for you to leave your car in long-term parking.”

  “That’s okay.” Sara’s reply was wooden. “I don’t want him to miss a day of work.” Although she imagined her brother-in-law would be more than glad to miss the work and make the trip if it meant having his house—and his wife—to himself again for a few weeks. She released a breath, pushing back the tangle of her hair again. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  Dixie patted Sara’s arm. “I know you are.”

  “It’s just . . .” She hesitated, not certain she wanted to put her thoughts into words, and, even if she did, how they would sound once spoken. She tightened her fists inside her pockets. “God, this doesn’t even feel like my life!” The words burst from her lips in a single breath, and once she had spoken them she didn’t seem to be able to stop. “Here I was, plain old Sara Graves, middle-aged workaholic, my entire life devoted to making the world a better place for useless household gadgets that break the minute the warranty runs out, and I had this one outrageous, incredible chance for adventure and I took it and that was crazy—it was crazy I would even do such a thing!—and suddenly I’m the widow of a man I’ve only known three months—a Frenchman, for God’s sake, with a whole heritage and culture and past I know nothing about . . . and it turns out there’s no one, no one in this entire world, left to deal with what he left behind but me. Me! They sure don’t prepare you for that in the romance novels, do they?” She wasn’t even aware of the tears that were streaming down her cheeks until a cold gust of wind stung her face, and she swiped the moisture away impatiently. “It’s like some great big sick cosmic joke. God, I am so tired of crying!”

  Sara pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes to stop the flow of tears, and drew in a breath through parted lips. “It isn’t fair.”

  She whirled away from her sister then, facing the ocean, and she screamed into the oncoming tide, “It! Isn’t! Fair!”

  The thunder of the water swallowed her words, and when the surf sucked outward again it seemed to take her fury with it, leaving her only tired, and drained. Her shoulders slumped.

  Dixie passed her a crumpled tissue from her pocket, and Sara blew her nose. After a moment, they started walking again.

  “It’s just that . . . I feel like I’ve used up all my chances, you know?” Sara’s voice was quieter now, resigned. “I’ll be fifty in a couple of years. Can you believe that? And there’s nothing left for me to do, no one for me to be. No more surprises. No more possibilities. I had my shot. And this trip to France . . . it just seems like someone forgot to tell me it’s over.”

  Dixie was shaking her head, curls bouncing in the wind, before Sara finished speaking. “That’s why you’ve got to go, Sara. You know that. Because until you deal with it—with every last single detail that Daniel left you to deal with—it won’t be over. And you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering why it ever was at all.”

  They walked in silence for a while, the heavy sand sucking at their sneakers, the whoosh and grumble of the surf their only companion. And then Sara said, “Do you have any idea how jealous I am of you?”

  Dixie stopped in her tracks, staring at her. Her astonishment was genuine. “Me?”

  Sara nodded. “Jeff, the twins, the way your phone is always ringing and it’s always someone you want to talk to, the way your house always smells like cinnamon rolls—”

  “And wet laundry and burned popcorn,” Dixie finished, with a small shake of her head. She looked up at her sister, doubt and puzzlement in her eyes. “I always thought you were disappointed in me,” she admitted, shifting her gaze briefly, as though embarrassed. “You worked so hard to get us both out of here . . . it was so important to you that I go to college . . . and what do I do after two years but drop out and marry Jeff and spend the rest of my life trying to have babies?”

  Sara and Dixie had grown up in a single-wide trailer home on the outskirts of a fishing town on the mainland. The whole town smelled like diesel fuel and fish guts. Though less than thirty nautical miles from where they stood, it was a lifetime away from the peaceful resort island of Little John.

  Sara said, “You live in a place where people ride their bicycles to town. You work in a bookstore. You can walk to the beach. You have macaroni and cheese for dinner.” Sara stopped, and took a breath, not wanting to sound maudlin. “You’re right. When we were kids, all I wanted for both of us was to get away from this godforsaken coast. I just never intended to go quite so far. That’s why I came back here. I know I’ve stayed too long. But . . . what’s here, what you have, is everything I’ve always wanted. And for a while I almost believed I could have it, too.”

  Dixie slipped her arm around Sara’s waist, hugging her briefly. “Remember how, after school, we used to ride our bikes over to Sandy Point and build sandcastles on the beach?”

  Sara smiled, remembering. “Some of them were really out of control. Huge.”

  “And you used to tell me stories about the princesses that lived there, and make believe we were them.”

  “I remember,” Sara said softly.

  “You,” Dixie told her, looking into her eyes, “are the reason I have everything I’ve always wanted. And you can stay with me as long as you like.”

  Sara was silent as they climbed the sandy wooden steps that led up to the street, away from the surf and the wind, and made their way back home.

  Sara had met Daniel at one of those ultra-exclusive Manhattan parties for which you had to have not only an invitation, but three references and a bodyguard to get in. Sting was there, and someone said Oprah was supposed to show, but she never did. Sara was there as a guest of a prospective client who wanted to impress her with his connections—or, more likely, didn’t want to miss the party and, since Sara was only in town for one night, saw no choice but to bring her along.

  There must have been two hundred people in attendance. The party spilled out of the penthouse apartment and onto the rooftop terrace, which was decorated with thousands of tiny white lights and exotic orchids that would never survive the cool, windy spring night. Sara preferred to remain indoors where the party was slightly less raucous, and she was glancing at her watch for perhaps the fifth time in the past half hour and wondering whether she had been here long enough to politely take her leave, or whether anyone would notice at all if she simply slipped out the door, when a voice spoke behind her. It was male, faintly but exotically accented, and gently chiding.
“No, no—it’s far too early for you to leave. If you do, you’ll never be invited to an A-list party again.”

  She forced a polite professional-party smile to her lips before she turned to greet the intruder. “I can’t tell you how unhappy that would make me.”

  She remembered thinking that he wasn’t particularly handsome. His nose was too sharp, his forehead too high, his lips a trifle too full. He wore his dark hair unfashionably long and loose about his shoulders. He was tall and thin, and wore a white silk shirt, light enough to see through, untucked over faded jeans. She thought the embroidery at the cuff was pretentious. But there was warmth in his cocoa eyes, and something that she could only describe as an intense and brilliant interest, as though everything about the world fascinated him; as though he couldn’t get enough of learning about it.

  She, on the other hand, was carefully cool and precise and disinterested. She wore Vera Wang. Her dark hair was upswept to display her long neck—which she knew was her best feature—and teardrop diamond earrings. Her makeup was impeccable. She was elegant, in control, and unapproachable, a look that she had mastered, along with so many other lies, over the years. Yet somehow the look had not worked with him.

  And although she generally would have, at that point, politely excused herself and moved away, she was intrigued enough to add, “How do you know how long I’ve been here, anyway?”

  “Because I’ve watched you since you entered,” he replied, “forty-two minutes ago. I’ve watched you check the time on five different occasions and I’ve watched you finish that silly orange drink a little too fast. So I’ve brought you another. What is it, anyway?”