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Dismay flashed across her features. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Are you a friend of Eileen’s?”
“You might say that.”
“What kind of friend? I never heard her mention you.” Disbelief tinged her expression and her voice.
Ethan removed his ball cap and combed his fingers through his hair. “I met Eileen several months ago in an online chat room.”
The chat room was a support group for post-traumatic stress disorder patients, but for now, that was his secret. As in AA, members kept their identities and all that was said in the online meetings confidential.
“Eileen and I,” he continued, “have corresponded regularly since then. And we’ve talked several times recently by phone. That’s how I set up the lease for this place. Eileen mailed me the papers.”
“Oh, dear.” Caroline, her pretty face crumpled with distress, shook her head. “I had no idea or I’d have told you that first day.”
“Told me what?”
“She’s gone.”
“Out of town?”
“She’s my friend, the one who—” Caroline struggled for words.
Ethan finally put the pieces together. “The one who died?”
Caroline nodded. “I just came from her funeral a few hours ago.”
He shook his head in bewilderment. “But that’s not possible.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You told me that your friend who died was old.”
“Eileen was ninety-eight.”
Stricken with sorrow and a sense of loss, Ethan sank onto the running board of his pickup. “I had no idea. She sounded so much younger in her postings and on the phone. So…alive.”
Caroline smiled through her sadness. “That was Eileen in a nutshell.”
Ethan had known that Eileen was a widow and a good bit older than he was, but he’d never guessed that she was in her nineties. When he’d confided to the support group that he needed to get away from Baltimore to try to put his life back together, she’d offered to rent her cottage with a promise of as much peace and quiet as he wanted. And she’d been savvy as well as generous. Fearing that he’d withdraw into a shell in the isolation of Orchard Cottage, she’d insisted that he share meals with her. She’d made the demand under the guise of needing company, but he’d known better. Eileen Bickerstaff had seemed too self-sufficient to need anyone.
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