Starlight On Willow Lake

#1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs sweeps readers away to a sun-drenched summer on the shores of Willow Lake in a stunning tale of the delicate ties that bind a family together…and the secrets that tear them apart

When caregiver Faith McCallum arrives at the enchanted lakeside estate of Avalon’s renowned Bellamy family, she’s intent on rebuilding her shattered life and giving her two daughters a chance at a better future. But she faces a formidable challenge in the form of her stubborn and difficult new employer, Alice Bellamy. While Faith proves a worthy match for her sharp-tongued client, she often finds herself at a loss for words in the presence of Mason Bellamy—Alice’s charismatic son, who clearly longs to escape the family mansion and return to his fast-paced, exciting life in Manhattan…and his beautiful, jet-setting fiancée.

The last place Mason wants to be is a remote town in the Catskills, far from his life in the city, and Faith McCallum is supposed to be the key to his escape. Hiring the gentle-hearted yet strong-willed caregiver as a live-in nurse gives his mother companionship and Mason the freedom to return to his no-attachments routine. For Faith, it means stability for her daughters and a much-needed new home. When Faith makes a chilling discovery about Alice’s accident, Mason is forced to reconsider his desire to keep everyone, including his mother, at a distance. Now he finds himself wondering if the supercharged life he’s created for himself is what he truly wants…and whether exploring his past might lead to a new life—and lasting love—on the tranquil shores of Willow Lake.

Also by Susan Wiggs

Contemporary Romances

Home Before Dark

The Ocean Between Us

Summer by the Sea

Table for Five

Lakeside Cottage

Just Breathe

The Goodbye Quilt

The Bella Vista Chronicles

The Apple Orchard

The Beekeeper’s Ball

The Lakeshore Chronicles

Summer at Willow Lake

The Winter Lodge

Dockside

Snowfall at Willow Lake

Fireside

Lakeshore Christmas

The Summer Hideaway

Marrying Daisy Bellamy

Return to Willow Lake

Candlelight Christmas

Historical Romances

The Lightkeeper

The Drifter

The Mistress of Normandy

The Maiden of Ireland

The Tudor Rose Trilogy

At the King’s Command

The Maiden’s Hand

At the Queen’s Summons

Chicago Fire Trilogy

The Hostage

The Mistress

The Firebrand

Calhoun Chronicles

The Charm School

The Horsemaster’s Daughter

Halfway to Heaven

Enchanted Afternoon

A Summer Affair

Starlight on Willow Lake

Susan Wiggs

For my parents, Nick and Lou Klist, my first and best readers. Your love, wisdom and courage are my inspiration.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Part Two

13

14

Part Three

15

Part Four

16

Part Five

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Part Six

24

25

26

27

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Extract

Copyright

Part One

“Of all things visible, the highest is the heaven of the fixed stars.”

—Nicolaus Copernicus

1

Mason Bellamy stared up at the face of the mountain that had killed his father. The mountain’s name was innocent enough—Cloud Piercer. The rich afternoon light of the New Zealand winter cast a spell over the moment. Snow-clad slopes glowed with the impossible pink and amethyst of a rare jewel. The stunning backdrop of the Southern Alps created a panorama of craggy peaks, veined with granite and glacial ice, against a sky so clear it caused the eyes to smart.

The bony, white structure of a cell phone tower, its discs grabbing signals from outer space, rose from a nearby peak. The only other intrusions into the natural beauty were located at the top of the slope—a black-and-yellow gate marked Experts Only and a round dial designating Avalanche Danger: Moderate.

He wondered if someone came all the way up here each day to move the needle on the dial. Maybe his father had wondered the same thing last year. Maybe it had been the last thought to go through his head before he was buried by two hundred thousand cubic meters of snow.

According to witnesses in the town near the base of the mountain, it had been a dry snow avalanche with a powder cloud that had been visible to any resident of Hillside Township who happened to look up. The incident report stated that there had been a delay before the noise came. Then everyone for miles around had heard the sonic boom.

The Maori in the region had legends about this mountain. The natives respected its threatening beauty as well as its lethal nature, their myths filled with cautionary tales of humans being swallowed to appease the gods. For generations, the lofty crag, with its year-round cloak of snow, had challenged the world’s most adventurous skiers, and its gleaming north face had been Trevor Bellamy’s favorite run. It had also been his final run.

Trevor’s final wish, spelled out in his last will and testament, had brought Mason halfway around the world, and down into the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. At the moment he felt anything but cold. He unzipped his parka, having worked up a major sweat climbing to the peak. This run was accessible only to those willing to be helicoptered to a landing pad at three thousand meters, and then to climb another few hundred meters on all-terrain skis outfitted with nonslip skins. He removed his skis and peeled the Velcro-like skins from the underside, carefully stowing the gear in his backpack. Then he studied the mountain’s face again and felt a sweet rush of adrenaline.

When it came to skiing in dangerous places, he was his father’s son.

A rhythmic sliding sound drew Mason’s attention to the trail he’d just climbed. He glanced over and lifted his ski pole in a wave. “Over here, bro.”

Adam Bellamy came over the crest of the trail, shading his eyes against the afternoon light. “You said you’d kick my ass, and you did,” he called. His voice echoed across the empty, frozen terrain.

Mason grinned at his younger brother. “I’m a man of my word. But look at you. You haven’t even broken a sweat.”

“Mets. We get tested for metabolic conditioning every three months for work.” Adam was a firefighter, built to haul eighty pounds of gear up multiple flights of stairs.

“Cool. My only conditioning program involves running to catch the subway.”

“The tough life of an international financier,” said Adam. “Hold everything while I get out my tiny violin.”

“Who says I’m complaining?” Mason took off his goggles to apply some defogger. “Is Ivy close? Or did our little sister stop to hire a team of mountain guides to carry her up the hill so she doesn’t have to climb it on her skis?”

“She’s close enough to hear you,” said Ivy, appearing at the top of the ridge. “And aren’t the guides on strike?” She wore a dazzling turquoise parka and white ski pants, Gucci sunglasses and white leather gloves. Her blond hair was wild and wind-tossed, streaming from beneath her helmet.

Mason flashed on an image of their mother. Ivy looked so much like her. He felt a lurch of guilt when he thought about Alice Bellamy. Her last ski run had been right here on this mountain face, too. But unlike Trevor, she had survived. Although some would say that what had happened to her was worse than dying.

Ivy slogged over to her brothers on her AT skis. “Listen, you two. I want to go on record to say that when I leave these earthly bonds, I will not require my adult children to risk their lives in order to scatter my remains. Just leave my ashes on the jewelry counter at Neiman Marcus. I’d be fine with that.”

“Make sure you put your request in writing,” Mason said.

“How do you know I haven’t already?” She gestured at Adam. “Help me get these skins off, will you?” She lifted each ski in turn, planting them upright in the snow.

Adam expertly peeled the fabric skins from the bottoms of her skis, then removed his own, stuffing them into his backpack. “It’s crazy steep, just the way Dad used to describe it.”

“Chicken?” asked Ivy, fastening the chin strap of her crash helmet.

“Have you ever known me to shy away from a ski run?” Adam asked. “I’m going to take it easy, though. No crazy tricks.”

The three of them stood gazing at the beautiful slope, now a perfect picture of serenity in the late-afternoon glow. It was the first time any of them had come to this particular spot. As a family, they had skied together in many places, but not here. This particular mountain had been the special domain of their father and mother alone.

They were lined up in birth order—Mason, the firstborn, the one who knew their father best. Adam, three years younger, had been closest to Trevor. Ivy, still in her twenties, was the quintessential baby of the family—adored, entitled, seemingly fragile, yet with the heart of a lioness. She had owned their father’s affections as surely as the sun owns the dawn, in the way only a daughter can.

Mason wondered if his siblings would ever learn the things about their father that he knew. And if they did, would it change the way they felt about him?

They stood together, their collective silence as powerful as any conversation they might have had.

“It’s incredible,” Ivy said after a long pause. “The pictures didn’t do it justice. Maybe Dad’s last request wasn’t so nutty, after all. This might be the prettiest mountain ever, and I get to see it with my two best guys.” Then she sighed. “I wish Mom could be here.”

“I’ll get the whole thing on camera,” Adam said. “We can all watch it together when we get back to Avalon next week.”

A year after the accident, their mother was adjusting to a new life in a new place—a small Catskills town on the shores of Willow Lake. Mason was pretty sure it wasn’t the life Alice Bellamy had imagined for herself.

“Do you have him?” Adam asked.

Mason slapped his forehead. “Damn, I forgot. Why don’t the two of you wait right here while I ski to the bottom, grab the ashes, helicopter back up to the rendezvous and make the final climb again?”

“Very funny,” said Adam.

“Of course I have him.” Mason shrugged out of his backpack and dug inside. He pulled out an object bundled in a navy blue bandanna. He unwrapped it and handed the bandanna to Adam.

“A beer stein?” asked Ivy.

“It was all I could find,” said Mason. The stein was classic kitsch, acquired at a frat party during Mason’s college days. There was a scene with a laughing Falstaff painted on the sides, and the mug had a hinged lid made of pewter. “The damned urn they delivered him in was huge. No way would it fit in my luggage.”

He didn’t explain to his sister and brother that a good half of the ashes had ended up on the living room floor of his Manhattan apartment. Getting Trevor Bellamy from the urn to the beer stein had been trickier than Mason had thought. Slightly freaked out by the idea of his father embedded in his carpet fibers, he had vacuumed up the spilled ashes, wincing at the sound of the larger bits being sucked into the bag.

Then he’d felt bad about emptying the vacuum bag down the garbage chute, so he’d gone out on the balcony and sprinkled the remains over Avenue of the Americas. There had been a breeze that day, and his fussiest neighbor in the high-rise co-op had stuck her head out, shaking her fist and threatening to call the super to report the transgression. Most of the ashes blew back onto the balcony, and Mason ended up waiting until the wind died down; then he’d swept the area with a broom.

So only half of Trevor Bellamy had made it into the beer stein. That was appropriate, Mason decided. Their father had been only half there while he was alive, too.

“This is cool with me,” said Adam. “Dad always did like his beer.”

Mason held the mug high, its silhouette stark against the deepening light of the afternoon sky.

“Ein prosit,” said Adam.

“Salut,” Mason said, in the French their father had spoken like a native.

“Cin cin.” Ivy, the artist in the family, favored Italian.

“Take your protein pills and put your helmet on,” Mason said, riffing on the David Bowie song. “Let’s do this thing.”

Ivy lowered her sunglasses over her eyes. “Mom loves skiing so much. It’s so sad that she’ll never ski again.”

“I’ll film it so she can watch.” Adam took off one glove with his teeth and reached up to switch on the Go Pro camera affixed to the top of his helmet.

“Should we say a few words?” asked Ivy.

“If I say no, will that stop you?” Mason removed the duct tape from the lid of the beer stein.

Ivy stuck out her tongue at him, shifting into bratty-sister mode. Then she looked up at Adam and spoke to the camera. “Hey, Mom. We were just wishing you could be here with us to say goodbye to Daddy. We all made it to the summit of Cloud Piercer, just like he wanted. It’s kind of surreal, finding winter here when the summer is just beginning where you are, at Willow Lake. It feels somehow like...I don’t know...like we’re unstuck in time.”

Ivy’s voice wavered with emotion. “Anyway, so here I am with my two big brothers. Daddy always loved it when the three of us were together, skiing and having fun.”

Adam moved his head to let the camera record the majestic scenery all around them. The sculpted crags of the Southern Alps, which ran the entire length of New Zealand’s south island, were sharply silhouetted against the sky. Mason wondered what the day had been like when his parents had skied this mountain, their last run together. Was the sky so blue that it hurt the eyes? Did the sharp cold air stab their lungs? Was the silence this deep? Had there been any inkling that the entire face of the mountain was about to bury them?

“Are we ready?” he asked.

Adam and Ivy nodded. He studied his little sister’s face, now soft with the sadness of missing her father. She’d had a special closeness with him, and she’d taken his death hard—maybe even harder than their mother had.

“Who’s going first?” asked Adam.

“It can’t be me,” said Mason. “You, um, don’t want to get caught in the blowback, if you know what I mean.” He gestured with the beer stein.

“Oh, right,” said Ivy. “You go last, then.”

Adam twisted the camera so it faced uphill. “Let’s take it one at a time, okay? So we don’t cause another avalanche.”

It was a known safety procedure that in an avalanche zone, only one person at a time should go down the mountain. Mason wondered if his father had been aware of the precaution. He wondered if his father had violated the rule. He doubted he would ever ask his mother for a detail like that. Whatever had happened on this mountain a year ago couldn’t be changed now.

Ivy took off her shades, leaned over and kissed the beer stein. “Bye, Daddy. Fly into eternity, okay? But don’t forget how much you were loved here on earth. I’ll keep you safe in my heart.” She started to cry. “I thought I’d used up all my tears, but I guess not. I’ll always shed a tear for you, Daddy.”

Adam waggled his gloved fingers in front of the camera. “Yo, Dad. You were the best. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Except for more time with you. Later, dude.”

Each one of them had known a different Trevor Bellamy. Mason could only wish the father he’d known was the one who had inspired Ivy’s tenderness and loyalty or Adam’s hero worship. Mason knew another side to their father, but he would never be the one to shatter his siblings’ memories.

Adam pushed through the warning gate and started down the mountain, the camera on his helmet rolling.

Ivy waited, then followed at a safe distance behind. Thanks to Adam, the cautious one of the three, each of them wore gear equipped with beacons and avalanche airbags, designed to detonate automatically in the event of a slide.

Their mother had been wearing one the day of the incident. Their father had not.

Adam skied with competence and control, navigating the steep slope with ease and carving a sinuous curve in the untouched powder. Ivy followed gracefully, turning his S-curves into a double-helix pattern.

The lightest of breezes stirred the icy air. Mason decided he had worked too hard to climb the damned mountain only to take the conservative route down. Always the most reckless of the three, he decided to take the slope the way his father probably had, with joyous abandon.

“Here goes,” he said to the clear, empty air, and he thumbed open the lid of the beer stein. The cold air must have weakened the pottery, because a shard broke loose, cutting through his glove and slicing into his thumb. Ouch. He ignored the cut and focused on the task at hand.

Did any essence of their father remain? Was Trevor Bellamy’s spirit somehow trapped within the humble-looking detritus, waiting to be set free on the mountaintop?

He had lived his life. Left a legacy of secrets behind. He’d paid the ultimate price for his freedom, leaving his burden on someone else’s shoulders—Mason’s.

“Godspeed, Dad,” he said. With his ski poles in one hand and the beer stein in the other, he raised his arm high and plunged down the steep slope, leaning into a controlled fall. Just for a moment, he heard his father’s voice: Lean into the fear, son. That’s where the power comes from. The words drifted to him from a long-ago time when everything had been simple, when his dad had simply been Dad, coaching him down the mountain, shouting with unabashed joy when Mason conquered a steep slope. That was probably why Mason favored adrenaline-fueled sports that involved teetering on the edge between terror and triumph.

The ashes created a cloud in his wake, rising on an updraft of wind and dispersing across the face of Trevor’s beloved, deadly mountain.

The things we love most can kill us. Mason might have heard the saying somewhere. Or he had just made it up.

The faster Mason went, the less he was bothered by something so inconvenient as a thought. That was the beauty of skiing in dangerous places. Filled with the thrill of the ride, he was only vaguely aware of Adam pointing the camera at him. He couldn’t resist showing off, making a trail in a fresh expanse of untouched powder, like a snake slithering down the mountain. Spotting a rugged granite cliff, its cornice perfectly formed for jumping, he raced toward it. Lean into the fear, son. He aimed his skis straight down the fall line and launched himself off the edge. For several seconds he was airborne, the wind flapping through his parka, turning him momentarily into a human kite. The steep pitch of the landing raced up to meet him with breathtaking speed. He wobbled on contact but didn’t wipe out, managing to come out of the landing with the mug still held aloft.

He gave a short laugh. How’s that, Dad? How’d I do? In one way or another, his whole life had been a performance for his father—in sports, in school, in business. He’d lost his audience, and it was liberating as hell. Which made him wonder why tears were fogging up his goggles. Then, as the slope flattened and his speed naturally slowed, he realized Ivy was waving her arms frantically.

Now what?

He raced toward them and saw that Adam had his mobile phone out.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Was my epic run not pretty enough? Or are you posting a Tweet about it already?”

Despite the chill air, Ivy’s face was pale. “It’s Mom.”

“On the phone? Tell her I said hi.”

“No, dipshit, something happened to Mom.”

2

For Mason, money was a tool, not a goal. And when he had to get from a remote mountain town to an international airport, he was glad he had plenty of it. Within a few hours of the aborted ash-sprinkling, the three of them were in the first-class lounge at Christchurch Airport, booked on a flight to New York. From there, they’d take a private plane up to Avalon, north toward Albany, along the Hudson. He’d instructed his assistant to find an amphibious plane so they could land on Willow Lake and tie up at the dock in front of their mother’s place.

The entire journey would take about twenty-four hours. Thanks to the time zone change, they would arrive the same day they left. The journey cost in the neighborhood of thirty grand, which he paid without batting an eye. It was only money. Mason had a knack for making money the way some guys made wooden birdhouses in their garages over the weekend.

Adam was on the phone with someone in Avalon. “We’re on our way,” he said. Then he checked the clock in the lounge. “We’ll get there when we get there. Yeah, okay, just sit tight.”

“Did you get more details out of them?” Mason asked.

“She fell down the stairs and broke her collarbone,” Adam said, and zipped the mobile phone into his pocket. “It’s a miracle she didn’t crack open her head or get crushed by her motorized chair.”

“I can’t believe she fell,” Ivy said, her voice trembling.

“And what the hell was she doing at the top of a flight of stairs?” Mason asked. “The entire downstairs of the house has been adapted for her.”

“If you bothered to go see her more than once in a blue moon, you’d know they finished installing the elevator,” Adam stated. He was in charge of her day-to-day care, living on the premises of the lakeside estate. Mason had taken the role of looking after provisions, finance and logistics for their mother, a role more suited to his comfort zone.

Mason batted aside his brother’s criticism. “Screw that. I don’t get how the hell she managed to fall down the stairs. She’s a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. She’s incapable of moving.”

“She can move her mouth and drive the chair with her breath,” Ivy pointed out. “She’s been working with her physical therapist on extending her arms at the elbow, so that can help with her mobility, too.”

“I don’t get why she was upstairs, either,” Mason said. His heart was pounding so hard that his chest hurt. He and his mother had their differences, but when it came down to moments like this, he felt nothing but love and sorrow. And now a surge of panic.

“You’re sure she’s all right?” Ivy asked, bringing a tray of cappuccinos and croissants to the seating area where they were waiting.

“Other than her usual state of rage and bitterness, yeah,” said Adam. “She’s okay.”

“Jesus.” Mason raked his splayed hand through his hair.

“No, the caregiver on duty was named José.” Adam consulted the email displayed on his phone.

“Fire the son of a bitch,” Mason ordered.

“I didn’t have to,” Adam said. “He quit. They all quit. None of her home health aides have lasted more than a few weeks.”