Filed To Story: Alessia Mistaken as Mistress Book PDF Free
Alessia grabbed a towel and wiped it up.
“So, where’s Claire?”
“I have something to tell you about Claire, but I can’t tell you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like-” Alessia gestured at her “-this. Like you are.”
“And how am I, sweetie?”
“You’re drunk!
“
She took a long swallow. “Hell, this ain’t drunk. I still know what I’m doin’.”
Alessia shook her head in frustration, thinking of Penelope’s close call, Nicholas’s anger and Leda’s embarrassment.
“So where’s Claire?”
Alessia gave her a long assessing stare. What would happen if she took all the liquor and came back when the woman was sober? It could be worse. She’d heard of men who went berserk when they couldn’t get drink. And the woman did have to learn about her daughter.
“Mrs. Patrick, I think-“
“Celia.”
“What?”
“My name’s Celia. Or Cele. But don’t call me Mrs. Patrick.”
“All right, Celia. I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you about Claire.”
Celia dropped onto the edge of the bed. “I knew it. The no-good bastard dropped her like a hot potato, didn’t he?”
Alessia blinked. “Who?”
“Stephen Halliday, the great playwright, of course. Who else did she marry?”
“Well-no one that I know of. No, he didn’t drop her, Celia…Stephen is dead. Didn’t you know that?”
“Yeah, I knew. I thought maybe he ditched her once they got back to the States or somethin’.”
“Why would he do that?”
“We ain’t exactly cut from the same cloth,” she said with a smirk, and Alessia remembered Claire saying the same thing when she spoke of her concern about the Hallidays not liking her. Perhaps her mother had instilled that fear in her.
“My Claire’s a pretty thing,” she went on. “Great legs. Knocked her up, he did.”
Alessia looked aside in disgust.
“I figured he’d take his jollies until she was fat, and then he’d look for somethin’ new.”
“Well, he didn’t,” Alessia said with increasing irritation. “He loved her very much.”
Celia snorted into her booze. “So what’s the bad news, then? Squander all his money, did he?” She set the glass down with a thunk. “Who are you, anyway?”
“That’s what I need to talk to you about”
“Well, I guess I ain’t goin’ anywheres. Talk.” She sat on the bed and flopped against the headboard.
Slowly, carefully, Alessia began by explaining her situation. She told Celia how she’d been riding the train westward in hopes of a job and somewhere to stay where she could have her baby and find work. She explained about meeting Stephen and Claire. And she told how she’d awakened in the hospital with the doctor and nurses calling her Mrs. Halliday and how it had all snowballed from there.
Celia stared at her with blurry eyes, drunk, but cognitive. She squinted hard at Alessia. “What are you sayin’, girl?” She sat up straight. “Are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”
She lunged to the edge of the bed and refilled the glass, taking several fortifying gulps.
“I’m afraid I am,” Alessia said plaintively. “Claire died in that train wreck.”
“What about her-her body?” the woman asked, with a jerky motion of her head.
“I have no way of knowing,” she confessed, all the guilt and anguish brought vividly to life. “Stephen was found and Nicholas had to identify his body and send him home for burial. If no one was looking for Claire’s body since they all thought I was her, I don’t know what happened to her.”
“What about your old man? Would they have known you were on the train?”
Alessia nodded. “My luggage was in the baggage car. I had papers and books that would identify the belongings, and they would have shipped them to my father. I think.”
“Maybe they sent her body to him, thinking she was you.”
Alessia hadn’t thought of that before. Maybe her father thought she was dead! Maybe he thought that was what she’d deserved.
“How can you even be sure Claire’s dead?”
Alessia studied her now, reading the numbed awareness. “If she were alive she would have contacted you or the Hallidays. Wouldn’t she?”
Celia nodded, tears glittering in her already glassy eyes. The hand holding the tumbler trembled. “She was good to me. She loved me. I was a rotten mother, but she loved me.”
Alessia didn’t know how she could feel pity for the woman after what she’d done earlier, but sympathetic tears prickled behind her eyes.
“Ya know I ain’t really surprised?” she said. “I had a horrible feeling about all of it-her marryin’ him, all of it. I knew nothin’ good was gonna come of it. She went and got herself killed.”
“The train crash was an accident, Mrs. Patrick. It was a terrible thing, and many lives were lost, but it was just an accident. No one had any control over it or knew it would happen.”
“Don’t call me that, I said. Pattie was a no-account son of a bitch, and I’d like to forget he ever existed.”
“I’m sorry. Celia. And I’m sorry about Claire. She was one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. Really.”
Celia’s face scrunched up and her shoulders shook for several heart-stopping moments. It was a wonder how this woman had produced a daughter like Claire. Alessia considered whether or not to cross over and put her arms around her, but Celia’s face and back straightened before she could decide.
“I wasn’t cut out to be no grandmother, anyhow,” she said, her voice low-pitched, and Alessia couldn’t argue with that one. “Wasn’t cut out to be no mother, neither. But Claire woulda been a good mother.”
Alessia nodded.
“She took care of me, she did.” She teared up again and blubbered into her liquor. “Who’s gonna take care of me now?”
Alessia stared at her in shock. Her meal ticket was gone! Was that all she thought of her daughter? And now she cried over who would take care of her-meaning supply the money for her indulgence. She bit her tongue. And thought
For nearly half an hour, Celia swung between bouts of tears and self-pity and feeble anger. Celia’s behavior wasn’t a one-time thing, she concluded She was a drunk, pure and simple, and until Claire had married Stephen, she’d taken care of her as best she could.