He had a strange look in his eyes, one I had never seen before. His face was stern, angry, but he looked hurt, in some deep emotional pain. Without speaking he approached the desk.
"I just want straight, truthful answers," he said icily. The cold tones in his voice froze my heart. He put his hands on the desk and leaned toward me, his dark eyes as hard as stone.
"What is it, Jimmy?" I asked, and I held my breath.
"Last week, when you took Christie into Virginia Beach to shop for her clothing, who did you meet?" he demanded.
My heart sank. For a moment I couldn't speak, I couldn't swallow, I couldn't breathe. He fixed his eyes on me with such fury, I was afraid to utter a sound.
"The truth!” he cried, slapping his hand down on the desk. I jumped in my seat.
"Michael," I said. He nodded and turned.
"I was going to tell you, Jimmy. Honest. I just wanted more time to pass," I cried quickly.
"How could you go to him after what he had clone to you?" Jimmy asked slowly. "How could you belittle yourself so?"
"Jimmy, I didn't want to go. He begged me on the phone. He said he wanted to see Christie once, at least, and I didn't think I had the right to say no. But when I got there I found he had different intentions."
"What sort of intentions?" Jimmy demanded, his eyes growing hot.
Quietly but quickly I told him everything. He sat down and listened when I got to the description of how Mr. Updike and Mr. Simons had handled it. Then he shook his head.
"You did all this and never told me what was happening?"
"I thought if I could end it quickly . . ."
He shook his head, his eyes filled with pain.
"But I'm your husband, Dawn, and Christie's father now. I was the one to come to, the one who should have protected you both. Instead, you lied to me."
"I thought you would do something terrible to him, Jimmy. I was going to tell you afterward. I tried a few times, but I couldn't do it, and then, when Clara Sue was killed . . ."
"You tried," he spat.
"I did, Jimmy. I couldn't stand the fact that I was lying to you. It's bothered me ever since," I swore.
"And you had Christie in on this deception," he said, shaking his head. "Telling her a jewelry salesman gave her a sample."
"It was better than telling her who he really was, Jimmy," I said. He stared at me so coldly I had to lower my eyes. "I'm so sorry I didn't tell you."
"And you wouldn't have, probably," Jimmy said. "I wouldn't have known anything about it if it weren't for Fern."
"Fern?" I looked up quickly.
"She asked Christie about that necklace and found out his name. She remembered who that was, and then she came to me and told me."
"Oh, Jimmy, she was just trying to hurt me, to hurt us. How horrible," I said.
"Sure, go and twist things around. Fern didn't lie, did she? Fern didn't conceal the truth, did she? She told me because she cares about me," he said, poking himself hard in the chest for emphasis. He stood up. "At least someone around here does!" he cried, and he marched out of the office, slamming the door behind him.
"Jimmy!" I screamed after him, but he did not come back.
I lowered my head to my arms on the desk and broke into uncontrollable sobs.
I had hurt the one person who loved me more than anyone in the world. How foolish and stupid I had been to have kept anything at all from him. I didn't deserve him. I made up my mind I would grovel at his feet, if I had to, in order to get him to forgive me.
I left the office to search for him and hurried outside to look for him somewhere on the grounds. I found some of our maintenance people working, but no one had seen Jimmy. Thinking he might have driven off, I went to where he parked his car and found it still there. Distraught and bewildered, I started back to the hotel. As I was walking by the gazebo I happened to look at the rear of the main building and saw the doorway to what had once been Philip's and then Jimmy's hideaway. The door was open. My heart began to flutter.
It was in there, in that forgotten little place where Jimmy and I had first revealed that our affections for each other were more than brotherly and sisterly. It was in there that we had kissed each other romantically and touched each other with the passion of lovers. It brought tears to my eyes to realize that after I had hurt him so and he had felt betrayed, he had gone back there.
"Oh, Jimmy," I cried, and I ran over the lawn to the doorway of the hideaway. I paused at the top of the steps and looked in. The single uncovered light bulb was on, and it cast a pale yellow glow over the otherwise dark room. I walked down the steps slowly and gazed in. Jimmy was on his back on the old cot, his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.
"Jimmy," I said softly. He turned slowly and then shook his head and turned away. I rushed across the old dirt and stone floor and knelt down at his side. Without speaking I buried my face in his chest.
"Oh, Jimmy," I cried. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. Please don't hate me. Please," I begged through my tears.
"I don't hate you, Dawn. I'm just afraid you're becoming too much like the woman you once despised."
"No, Jimmy, I'm not."
He stared at me a moment.
"You know why I was so mad at you when I first heard you had gone to him?"
"Yes, because I didn't tell you."
"No," he said. "Because I was afraid I would lose you to him again."
"Really, Jimmy?" He nodded. "You will never lose me, Jimmy. Never, never, never. When you ran out of my office before, I thought I was going to lose you."
"I don't ever want to feel that way again, Dawn," he said. "We must promise never to lie to each other again. Will you promise?"
"Of course I will, Jimmy."
He looked around and smiled.
"I can remember every moment in here with you. I remember our first kiss, how long it took for me to bring my lips to yours."
"And then we pretended to be meeting each other for the first time," I said.
"We were, for the first time as boyfriend and girlfriend."
"And now we're here as husband and wife," I said.
He shook his head and smiled again, tenderly.
"What am I going to do with you? I guess I'll just have to keep a closer eye on you," he said.
"There's nothing I want more," I told him, and we kissed. He guided me up and moved over on the cot, coaxing me in beside him.
"Jimmy . . . here?" I said when he drew me to him. "What could be more romantic than for us to make love where we had our first kiss?" he asked.
I answered with another kiss, a longer and more passionate one, and then I slipped in beside him and welcomed his caress.
Jimmy and I behaved like teenagers sneaking about as we came up the stone steps. We didn't want to have to answer anyone's questions. Jimmy peered out first to be sure no one was nearby.
"I'd better get back to work," Jimmy said, and we parted by the duck pond, him rushing off to join the construction team at the south end of the main building and me walking back to my office. The afternoon sunshine was weak, but still strong enough to feel like a warm caress on my cheeks and forehead. In the distance two enormous puffy clouds looked like mountains of white cotton rushing toward each other over a sea of blue. The winter wind made a burlap bag caught on the handle of a lawn mower flap like the flag of some unknown country.
Nature had a way of making me pensive and philosophical. How close I had come to losing Jimmy, I thought, and how lucky I was that he loved me so much. Would I eventually have told him about Michael? I wondered. Thinking about it reminded me of what Fern had done. Why did she dislike me so much? Why did she want to drive a wedge between Jimmy and me? How sad it made me feel to think that the little baby I had once loved and cared for almost as much as my very own child had grown into a spiteful and mean little girl. How much could we excuse because of what had happened to her? I wondered. And what damage were Jimmy and I doing by overlooking and forgiving?
Instead of going directly to the hotel I marched across the grounds to our house. Before dinner tonight I wanted to have a private conversation with Fern so she understood that what she had done was wrong. I wanted to impress upon her how deeply and completely Jimmy and I loved each other, and that nothing she could do would change that. She should be happy she is living in a house of love, I thought. Wasn't that what she wanted? Wasn't the absence of that what she despised?
When I arrived at the house I went directly upstairs, expecting to find Fern working on her homework as usual. I knocked on her closed door and waited, but I heard nothing. I knocked again and then opened the door. She wasn't there. Looking around the room, I realized she wasn't keeping it very neat these days. Some of her clothing was strewn about, draped over the backs of chairs, on the vanity table and on the poorly made bed. One half of a pair of sneakers was in front of the bed while its mate rested on its side near the closet, which was opened wide, the garments dangling precariously on hangers, some clothing already fallen.
My gaze moved to the pile of blouses and skirts on the closet floor and settled on a partially opened shoe box. Something in it caught my eye, and I walked forward slowly, knelt down and opened the box completely. Inside there was a pile of money. The missing petty cash? I wondered, and I began to count. After I went over eight hundred dollars I knew it must be so. I wasn't surprised. I wasn't sure what I should do. Surely she would claim this was the money she had brought with her, I thought, even though it was a great deal more than I had seen in her pocketbook in New York.
As I rose and turned to leave I noticed one of her older romance magazines opened on the bed. What made this particular one odd to me was the way Fern had underlined some passages. I turned the pages back to get to the beginning, and when I saw the title of the story my face flushed so from the blood that rushed into it, I was sure I was feverish. As if I needed to hear the words spoken to believe them, I read the title aloud.
" 'My Stepfather Raped Me, but I Had No One to Tell.' "
Slowly, my fingers trembling, I lifted the magazine and began to read.
For as long as I can remember, my mother was too busy to really look after me. She was a clothes designer and was always involved in her work. It was my stepfather who would look after me, dress me and even feed me. He did it so often and so casually, I never thought much about it until I was in fourth grade and happened to mention to a friend of mine that my stepfather usually came in while I was taking a bath to make sure I washed the "important places."
My friend looked at me strangely and asked, "What important places?"
I giggled and simply said, "You know. Your important places."
She still looked confused, so I pointed. Now she looked frightened and stopped talking to me about it, but I soon realized why she was uncomfortable. No one else's father did what my stepfather was doing.
I lowered the magazine to my lap. My heart was pounding, and I felt the beads of a cold sweat break out down the back of my neck. For a moment I couldn't move. I looked at the magazine again and shook my head. Then I went to the telephone quickly to call the hotel. I asked for Robert Garwood.
"Robert," I said frantically, "please go out and get Jimmy. Tell him I need him at the house immediately. Please."
"Right away, Mrs. Longchamp," he said. I hung up and sat down to wait, and while I did, I read some more. The girl in the story talked about her mother forgetting her birthday. That line was underlined, too. Her stepfather's rape of her began with him coming in to kiss her good night, but staying to fondle her under the blanket. Finally one night he slipped in beside her.
Still reading, I heard the door slam downstairs.
"Dawn!" Jimmy cried.
"Upstairs, Jimmy." He pounded up the steps and stopped in our doorway, out of breath from running all the way. "What's wrong?"
"It's Fern . . . it's this," I said, extending my arm, the magazine in my hand.
"Romance magazines?" He grimaced. "We always knew she read that stuff—"
"Look at the story and read the passages she underlined."
"Underlined?" He took the magazine from me and began to read. His face, red from his running, gradually turned more and more ashen. His dark eyes registered shock and grew cold with horror. "My God," he said, lowering the magazine, "she got it all out of here!"
"She's been living a romance magazine fantasy, and we believed her and accused those people of horrible, horrible things," I said.
"But why didn't Clayton Osborne put up more of a fight?" Jimmy wondered, "if it wasn't true?"
"He was probably afraid of what a scandal would do to his career, and he knew Fern wouldn't abandon her story.
"At the bottom of her closet," I continued, "there's a shoe box full of money, some of which I am positive is the missing petty cash."
Jimmy lowered himself into a chair and stared dumbly down at the floor, shaking his head.
"What are we going to do?" he muttered.
"We have to confront her, Jimmy. She has to know we realize everything she's done," I said.
"Do we send her back?" he asked.
There was no question in my mind that Jimmy would do whatever I told him now. A part of me wanted to rid us of this evil child, this problem that, I now realized, would take much of our energy and attention to correct. I would be forever worried about Fern's influence on Christie, too.
But Fern was Jimmy's sister, and something stronger in me rejected the idea of sending away family. I had seen and lived through too much of that myself.
"I don't think her going back to the Osbornes is the answer, Jimmy. They are obviously not as mean and as evil as Fern had painted them to be, but they are two people who are overwhelmed by her and unwilling, perhaps, to make the sacrifices of time and energy required to give her the love and attention she needs to overcome her nasty ways.
"No, she should stay, but stay under a different set of rules and circumstances," I concluded. Jimmy nodded. Then we heard the door open and close downstairs. The children were home. Christie ran for the kitchen, where Mrs. Boston had her milk and cookies waiting, but Fern began a slow ascent to her room. We waited until she reached the second-floor landing, and then we both stepped out to greet her. She looked up with surprise.
"Why is everyone home already?" she asked, her eyes narrowing suspiciously at me.
"We want to talk to you, Fern," I said firmly. "In your room."
"What? Why?" she countered.
"Now," I commanded, and she hurried along. We followed her in. She dropped her books on her bed and flopped back on it, folding her arms defiantly over her chest.
"So?" she said. "You're mad because I told Jimmy about you seeing Michael Sutton, I suppose."
"I'm mad about that, yes—mad because of the way you went about it—but that's not why we want to speak to you right now," I said.
She lifted her eyes with new interest.
"Then what is it?" she asked.
"This," I said, holding out the magazine. As soon as she realized what was in my hand, her face blanched and her eyes filled with fear. She tried to cover it with anger.
"You went snooping in my things?" she cried.
"Dawn doesn't go snooping in anyone's things," Jimmy said sharply; stepping up beside me.
"That's not what's important here, Fern," I said. "It's what's in this magazine, what you read and memorized and pretended had happened to you."
"I didn't," she cried, real tears emerging.
"You did! You did!" I insisted, slapping the magazine over my open palm. It sounded like a gunshot, and her sobbing stopped instantly. "We're not going to pretend anymore, and you're going to tell the truth once and for all. And I warn you, Fern: If you lie to us just once—just once, mind you—we'll ship you out of here. If the Osbornes don't want you, you'll go to a home for wayward girls."
I don't know where I garnered the strength and coldness to pronounce these words, but as I spoke them I saw flashes of Grandmother Cut
ler before me, her face stern, her shoulders hoisted, her fury fierce.
Fern cowered.
"I . . . I hated it there," she said.
"All you had to do was tell us the truth," Jimmy said.
"I knew you couldn't get me back, because I was legally theirs."
"So you made it all up, copied the ideas from this story?" I demanded. I had to have her confess it. She hesitated and then nodded. "What?" I said.
"I made it up. But please, please don't send me back to them. Clayton is cruel, he really is mean, and he doesn't love me, and Leslie doesn't help. He treats her like a child, too," she claimed.
"In that shoe box in your closet there is a lot of money," I said, nodding toward it. "How did you get it? All of it?"
"I stole it," she muttered.
"What?" Jimmy asked, wanting her to speak louder and own up to her crimes.
"I stole it," she shouted through her tears. "Some of it from Leslie and Clayton, and some of it from the front desk," she admitted.
"Why would you steal from us?" Jimmy asked. "We never denied you anything you needed or wanted."
"I thought you might ask me to leave someday, and I was going to run away if you did, so I needed money."
"You did a terrible thing, Fern," I said. "Not just the stealing of the money, but the attempt to steal our love and concern for you. You tried to win our love by turning us against the Osbornes. No matter what life was like with them, it was wrong to make such accusations about him."
The tears grew heavier, thicker down Fern's cheeks.
"Are you sending me back?" she asked, looking from me to Jimmy.
"That's up to Dawn," Jimmy said firmly. Fern's eyes widened, and then she looked at me, expecting the worst.
"We should," I began. "You said you came home with us because you wanted to be with a family where there was love in the home, but you have tried in all sorts of ways to hurt us." She looked down. "Jimmy and I love each other as much as two people can love each other in this world, and nothing can change that," I said. "But that doesn't mean we can't love other people very much, too. It's because we have such love for each other that we understand how important it is.