Free Pages of Sin by Kate Carlisle Page A

she was banished from the family circle again. It didn’t seem fair that Byron had held a grudge all these years over what she’d said. At the time, he must have been overly sensitive about Wanda’s agoraphobia.
    But poor Elaine. What a bumpy road she’d traveled. I squeezed her hand. “I think you were very brave to come back here and face him.”
    Surprised, she smiled at me, but it faded quickly. I wondered if she was thinking about that kiss. How could she not be? I certainly was. It was a humdinger, as my father would say.
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have come back, though. I should have listened to Marjorie. She told me not to, said it would be too much for me to face Byron. But I didn’t come back because of him. I came for Wanda. She was my sister and I loved her. She and I had become close friends again, behind Byron’s back. It breaks my heart to know she took her own life. I keep wondering why she . . . Oh, dear.” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed quietly.
    The waiter delivered our plates and I ordered a glass of their excellent Pinot Gris.
    “I’ll have one, too,” Mom said, sounding a trifle desperate. “And bring one for her, as well.”
    Elaine looked up, her eyes red and damp with tears. “Wine’s probably a bad idea.”
    “One of us will finish it if you don’t,” Mom assured her.
    We ate in silence for a few minutes. My seared scallops were drenched in rich garlicky butter and practically melted in my mouth. Of course, that didn’t keep me from snagging some of Mom’s skinny French fries. Birds twittered in the trees and sunlight glistened off the rocks in the stream. I watched a squirrel tiptoe along the gnarled branch of an oak tree that grew in the shallow canyon.
    “I wrote him a letter back then,” Elaine said softly, as she broke off a piece of her fragrant, thin-crusted pizza.
    My back tensed up and I exchanged a swift glance with Mom, whose eyes narrowed in speculation.
    “When was this, dear?” Mom said.
    “It was the night before I left for Senegal. Byron had been out of town on a lengthy business trip to Japan. The church had a sudden cancellation and told me I was the next name on the list of people to go on this mission. I was instructed to be ready to fly out the following afternoon.”
    “Couldn’t you have waited a week or so?”
    “No, I couldn’t refuse the request. That was unacceptable. This group wasn’t like your Fellowship, Becky. They were very strict. Wanda kept telling me to leave them and join Robson’s group, but I felt I’d found the true church. The true church for martyrs and masochists, as it turned out.” She shook her head in disgust. “We were all so stupid back then.”
    Mom cut into her steak. “Yes. Well, some of us were smarter than others.”
    Elaine laughed for the first time. “True.”
    “So you wrote Byron a letter,” I prompted, wanting to get back on topic.
    “Oh, yes,” she said, taking another dainty bite of pizza before continuing. “I gave the letter to Marjorie to give to him when he returned the following week. She swore she gave it to him.”
    “Did Marjorie actually see him read it?” I asked.
    Puzzled, Elaine peered at me. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. When I returned from Africa and confronted them, Marjorie insisted she’d given the letter to him. And Byron was just as adamant that he’d never seen it.”
    I looked at my mother again. Somebody in that family was lying.
    Mom changed the subject. “Regardless, he must have known you loved him.”
    Elaine’s lips were trembling now and I was worried she’d burst into tears again, but she held herself together. “I’d never actually told him I loved him before I left. But he must have known I did because he asked me to marry him two days before he left for Japan.”
    Mom nodded. “Then he must have known.”
    “But I hadn’t given him my answer yet. That’s why I wrote the letter. To tell him how much I loved him and that I would marry