Free Dead Rapunzel by Victoria Houston Page B

enforcement. So, yes, you can have children with someone you hate—it’s just that you may not experience that hatred until too late.
    â€œPhilip was married young—I think he was only twenty-five. He met Caroline at a friend’s wedding. He thought she was very pretty, which she was. She thought he was very rich, which he was,” said Judith with a wry laugh. “Surprise, surprise—guess who announced she was pregnant three months after they started dating.
    â€œPhilip told Rudd that Caroline’s parents allegedly were scandalized and demanded that he marry her, but he always suspected her mother had encouraged her to trap him into the marriage. And back in the day that’s what a responsible young man did. So they eloped. Seven months later, Sloane arrived.
    â€œFrom what he told Rudd—and who knows what the real story is because we all know the definition of a dysfunctional family is ‘more than one person’—Caroline went on to have two more children over the next ten years and then she locked her bedroom door. Not figuratively, either. Whatever her reasons, now that she had three children, plenty of money, and a lovely home in Lake Forest—she felt she no longer needed to put up with Philip.
    â€œOn the other hand, she refused to divorce him and he didn’t push it. His father had kept a mistress for years, and since both Philip’s parents were still alive, Philip didn’t want the Tomlinson history of marital misery selling Chicago papers. Maybe he was too private for his own good.
    â€œBut with the estrangement from Caroline, he had no reason to stay in Lake Forest. He could manage the family fortune from anywhere, so he moved up north. At first he lived in the old lodge built by his grandfather, but when Caroline decided that she and the children should spend the summers there, too, Philip bought himself an old Airstream house trailer and put it down twenty feet from the lake and far away from the family.”
    â€œA house trailer? That seems odd. He could certainly afford to build another house, couldn’t he?” asked Lew.
    â€œYes, but he loved being right on the water, and I think he took great satisfaction in the fact that his trailer appalled Caroline. She was not going to take visitors down to a trailer home, so he knew he was safe. And it was cozy. Philip was a good cook and he had outfitted the little kitchen just the way he wanted. His fishing boat and canoe were right there—”
    â€œYou’ll have to see my place,” Ray interrupted. “I know just how the guy felt. Sounds just like my trailer.”
    â€œExcept yours has a monster fish painted on it,” said Lew. “Yours is a house trailer designed to frighten small children.”
    â€œReally?” Judith sounded intrigued. “Hmm. Well, let me finish because I know it’s getting late. Are we the last ones here?” She looked around.
    â€œThere are people in the bar,” said Osborne. “They don’t close until midnight.”
    â€œBut you folks have had a long day,” said Judith. “I’ll talk fast. By the time Rudd met Philip, he had been living in the house trailer for years. He was a widower. Caroline had stumbled one day, fallen down the basement stairs in the old lodge, and died of a skull fracture. By that time, the children were grown. Sloane was on her second marriage, and Tim was alleged to be an artist living summers in Quebec and spending winters painting and scuba diving in Bonaire.
    â€œTim, for the record, was his mother’s favorite. That woman saved every drawing, every painting he did since he was a toddler. When Rudd and Philip decided to have the lodge torn down for structural reasons, not to mention bad memories, it took an entire day to empty the two rooms where Caroline had stored every piece of art that her son had produced. But it was the kind of stuff that only a mother would love.