“Well, he did tell me some personal things.”
“What? How did any of that concern me?” I was practically lunging at him. My aggressive questioning made him wince.
“He was infatuated with you,” he said. “At times, he embarrassed me with his revelations, telling me how he fantasized about you. He even admitted to coming down the hallway very late at night and just standing here quietly, hoping to hear you move or sigh or something. It was . . . a little sick, I think. I told him so, and he stopped talking to me about you. I didn’t say anything about it, because I can’t see how it would relate to his disappearance, do you?”
I stared at him a moment. Of course I could see how it would relate. If Ava had confronted him, he would have seen the resemblances between Ava and myself, and she would have known enough to use my name to tempt and hook him. “Easy fish,” she would call him.
“No,” I told Jim in a calmer tone. “You’re right. There was no need to mention that. It would just add something confusing.”
“I’m sure he’ll show up. He’s a weird guy. Mrs. Winston doesn’t appreciate how weird he is. I don’t think it’s beyond him to ignore what’s proper etiquette as it relates to her and Mrs. McGruder.”
“Probably so,” I said.
He stood there searching for some other way to keep me talking.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got to get ready to go out, Jim. I’m sorry.”
“Of course,” he said, taking a step back. He didn’t turn away. I had to close the door in his face.
When Liam came for me, he wanted to know more about Collin Nickels. He had given it more thought, especially because I had looked so disturbed to hear about him. I told him I hardly knew him at all.
“Except for one short conversation in the upstairs hallway, I barely exchanged another word with the man.”
“You seemed really concerned about him,” he said.
“I could see how disturbed your great-aunt Amelia was, that’s all.”
He nodded. For now, I got by with that, but there would surely be something else soon to make him wonder about me and my reactions.
Another week went by without any resolution to the mystery of the missing Collin Nickels. I learned that a police detective had come by while I was at work to go through Collin’s things, and then eventually they had gathered everything and taken it down to the police station, hoping it would produce some lead. I hoped he hadn’t written anything about me that would bring them back to question me further. Apparently, there was nothing. At breakfast daily, either Mrs. Winston or Mrs. McGruder would announce that another day had passed without any news.
“It’s as if he literally disappeared,” Mrs. Winston told me. “One day, he just evaporated. I didn’t get to know him that well, but he had a real love for history. I enjoyed our little talks at breakfast and dinner.”
“Oh, he’ll turn up looking embarrassed about it all,” Mr. Brady insisted. She gave him one of her disapproving glares, and he quickly returned to his breakfast.
Five days later, when I returned from work, Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder greeted me in the hallway outside the dining room. They had apparently been waiting for my arrival. My first thought was that Collin Nickels’s body had been found. I almost wished for that. No body of any man delivered to Daddy was ever found. If Collin’s body was found, that would eliminate Ava as a suspect. He had come to some other misfortune, which, whatever it was, wasn’t as bad, I was sure. But they had something else on their minds.
“We both think you have made a very wise and very generous decision, Lorelei,” Mrs. Winston began. The two of them wore identical smiles of approval.
“Decision? What decision?”
“To permit your father to do his fatherly duty and attend your wedding.” She turned to draw my attention to a framed needlework on the hallway wall. It was a quote from Alexander Pope sewn in black thread on a milk-white background. She read it aloud. “ ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine.’ ”
I nodded. It was as I had thought it would be. Daddy would come gracefully into all of their lives, charming them so quickly and completely that they would wonder how things could have grown so bad between us in the first place. It would soon come to the point where if I ignored and avoided him or slighted him in any way, I would look like the bad one. Insidiously, he would thread his way into the lives of anyone who had grown close to me there, his friendship clearly a double-edged sword, for I knew that he could wipe any of them out of existence. Every relative’s or friend’s hand he shook, every woman’s cheek he kissed, would be a marker indicating to whom or where he would return in his most vicious and volatile way. He would greet everyone but slide a smile toward me to remind me of his power.
“I’ll do my best,” I told them.
“It will all go well,” Mrs. McGruder insisted, stepping forward to squeeze my hand gently.
“In the end, we all depend upon our families,” Mrs. Winston added. “Blood is thicker than water.”
She had no idea how true that was for my family. I nodded and went up to my room, moving now like someone waiting for the second shoe to drop, the lightning bolt to strike, and the earth to quake under my feet, sending me hurrying back into Daddy’s arms and the life I had hoped to avoid. Practically every night, I reconsidered fleeing but always came to the same conclusion. If they could find me here, they could find me anywhere. It wasn’t simply the announcement in the social news, for I had seen Ava before that appeared, and either someone from Daddy’s clan or another living in the vicinity already had sent me a sharp, nearly deadly warning with the accident Jim and I were forced into having that night. Meeting the elderly man on the plane was no accident. I knew I was being shadowed, followed, and watched from the moment I had left Buddy and stepped into Moses’s tractor-trailer, and in my heart of hearts, I knew I would always be on their radar.
In the days that followed, Mr. Dolan began to inform me when Daddy sent money to pay for things. They had apparently had a number of conversations about the arrangements. At just about every family gathering now, which included Mrs. Wakefield, Ken Dolan mentioned my father and his eagerness to see me whenever I would agree. I was always asked if I hadn’t already spoken to him on the phone. I said no but added that it would be better for us to meet right before the wedding. A few days later, Mr. Dolan informed me that he was organizing the rehearsal dinner at one of the fanciest restaurants in Quincy. It was planned for the evening before our wedding. He had booked its private room. Besides the family, there were some of his business associates and their wives attending.
“People who watched Liam grow up,” he told me. “And some of the people who work at the company, like Michael Thomas.”
By now, he felt like an old friend to me, too. He was always there in the morning to pick me up if Liam was away and always there to volunteer to take me home if I wanted a ride. He loved talking about his family, and I loved listening.
“I wasn’t sure if there was anyone you wanted to invite,” Mr. Dolan continued. “I mean, aside from your father and his wife, you have no other guests on your end, and—”
“No, no one,” I said quickly. “I mean, I’m sure Mrs. McGruder is invited to everything.”
“Oh, absolutely. She and my aunt are attached at the hip.”
“They are,” I said, smiling.
“Neither your father nor you have mentioned any relatives. I know traveling to a wedding is always a burden, but . . .”
“No. There is no one I was close enough to whom I would want at the wedding. My father knows that.”
“Okay,” he said, looking sad and concerned. “We’ll be the family you never had.”
The subject was dropped, but then he finally asked me about the disappearance of Collin Nickels. Mrs. Winston was still talking about it.
“My aunt’s obviously very disturbed. I looked into the police investigation myself, but there are no leads. Did you know him at all?”
“No,
” I said.
“As long as it isn’t upsetting you, then,” he added.
I assured him that it wasn’t. I told him I felt sorry for the man’s family, but I repeated that I didn’t know him well enough to be emotionally involved.
“Right. Well, so much goes on that we will never understand.”
“Yes, so much,” I repeated, a little more emphatically than he expected.
We dropped that subject, too. Every day, however, I anticipated Ava’s sudden appearance, with her confident smile. I searched every shadow, studied every woman who walked anywhere near me or near Liam and me when we were out. I was particularly nervous about it when Julia accompanied me to my wedding-dress fitting. I noticed something brighter in her eyes and a rosy flush in her cheeks when she came by to pick me up. She drove off with the impish smile of a cat that had swallowed a canary.
“What?” I asked.
She looked at me and widened her eyes. “You’re obviously distracted this morning,” she said. “Usually, you’re more observant.”
“What . . .” I gasped when I saw her engagement ring.
The look on my face made her laugh. She had to pull over to the side of the road, and we hugged.
“I really owe it to you,” she said. “Ever since I took your advice and let Clifford know about my feelings, he’s been warmer and more loving.”
“We have to celebrate this,” I said.
“We will. We’re all going to the Underground. Liam talked Clifford into it. It’s time we all let our hair down a little,” she added. “Anyway, it won’t be long before we’ll have another wedding on the estate.”
“I’m really happy for you, Julia.”
“Your coming here was truly a blessing for this family,” she said. She had no idea why that made me feel so terrible. I forced a smile, but she knew me well enough by now to see through it. “What’s wrong, Lorelei? Is it your father?”
“Yes.”
“Well, don’t be nervous about it. I’ll be there for you. We’ll all be. Even Clifford,” she added with a bigger smile.
I had to relax. I had to overcome my fears, at least for the time being. What could happen next was something I tried desperately to avoid imagining. At some point, however, there would be no way to distract myself. The weight of concern would drag me down and make me the dark and unenthusiastic one in the room.
Julia hugged me again, and then we drove on.
“We’ll worry about me later. Right now,” she said, “we have to concentrate on your wedding. But just think how much I will learn from it. I’ll avoid all your mistakes,” she added, laughing.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m the test pilot.”
“You are, but you’ll have a wonderful wedding and a great honeymoon, I’m sure.”
Only if Daddy lets me, I thought, and couldn’t imagine why he ever would. Julia couldn’t stop talking, and I couldn’t stop looking everywhere and at every person, waiting to see Ava or even Daddy standing off to the side watching me. I didn’t see either of them, but that didn’t bring any relief. I still had the feeling that I was being closely observed. I knew they would let me see them when they were ready. There was no catching either of them off-guard.
We had a great time at the dress fitting and then at lunch. Now that Julia was engaged, we had more in common. We were chattering away and laughing so much that I forgot all of my fears for the moment and luxuriated in the freedom and joy that the immediate future promised. Surely, I thought, when Daddy saw me, he would realize that it would be wrong to force me to come back. Wrong or not, another voice said, he can’t let you go in front of the others. The danger was that they would think he was weak, and it wouldn’t be only my sisters who would think it. There would be Mrs. Fennel and the others, the external family, as he once called them. When I was younger, I had been introduced to them as if they were uncles and aunts. Maybe they were, in a real sense. There was still so much I didn’t know about Daddy’s world, so much I was supposed to start learning.
Everything continued so smoothly that I began to wonder if it all might happen after all. Daddy had not appeared mysteriously in my room and told me to leave. He had put in the money for the wedding and apparently had good conversations with Mr. Dolan. Ava had not appeared at the front of the Winston House again. What was going on? They had done something to poor Collin Nickels, hadn’t they? Was this just their way of tormenting me, hoping that I would throw up my hands and surrender? Were they hoping that I would choose to return without any further encouragement or threat?
Surely, my steadfastness and determination had given them second thoughts. Could Daddy have concluded that it made no sense now to pull me back into their world, that the best solution was to carry on the deception and let me go?
Should I pray?
Would the God who hadn’t taken interest enough in all these centuries to stop Daddy and his kind suddenly care about my small soul?
The answers were finally revealed on Saturday night, when Julia, Clifford, and Liam came by to pick me up so the four of us could celebrate at the Underground. The joviality in the car resembled a New Year’s Eve celebration. I welcomed it, thinking that yes, maybe this was the end of one story and the beginning of another. I’d be a different kind of Cinderella at midnight. Magically, I would stop being a princess in Daddy’s kingdom and become an ordinary young woman in the world I longed to enjoy.
20
The four of us were more carefree and loose than we had ever been, together or separately. We were quickly the center of attention, especially out on the dance floor, sometimes moving together, exchanging partners, even dancing woman-to-woman and man-to-man. The music couldn’t be too loud for Clifford right now. He was pretty buzzed very quickly, I thought, and I suspected that he and Julia might have begun celebrating before Liam had driven them to the Winston House to get me. They’d be sorry in the morning, I told myself. Alcohol didn’t have anywhere near the effect on me that it had on them, but I was a good actress, mimicking and pretending that it did.
We took breaks to eat a little, drink a little more, toasting to our future and especially to the success of Liam’s and my wedding. Just when I thought everyone had been sufficiently exhausted, they wanted to go back on the dance floor. To me, it seemed that Julia was finally letting go, doing what she always wanted and dreamed she would do, having a wild and carefree time with the man she loved. The more she got Clifford to do, the happier she was. It was as if it confirmed for her that they would have a good marriage after all.
It was going so well that I ignored any small alarms sounding inside me. After all, I wanted to drive back dark thoughts or worries as much as any of them and welcomed the way we infected one another with our excitement, our laughter, and our hugs and kisses. Only once did I pause to wonder if this was the way people had behaved right before the Titanic hit an iceberg. The glitter, the champagne, the wonderful food, and the music cloaked them in such joyous elation that they were oblivious to anything threatening and evil outside their warm embrace of deep joy.
And then I saw her, my own private iceberg.
She was suddenly there, dancing right beside us, drawing Liam’s and Clifford’s eyes to her with her ebullient sexuality, her ravishing beauty heightened in her electric eyes, her silky hair and bulging bosom drawing them deeper into her cleavage until they literally began to sway to her rhythm, not ours.
I screamed like someone who had stepped on a nail. It broke the spell. Both Clifford and Liam turned to me. I pretended to have twisted my ankle. The three of them surrounded me. Liam threw my right arm over his shoulders and, with his left around my waist, guided me hopping on one foot off the dance floor to our table. Swaying, unsteady himself, Clifford was down on his knees examining my ankle. I sat back, exaggerating the pain, gasping.
“She’s probably strained a tendon,” Clifford said. “Not too bad, no swelling or bruising around the joint. I don’t feel anything broken, but an X-ray can’t hurt.”
&nbs
p; “You would suggest it,” Julia said, trying to lighten the moment. “I think he gets a commission.”
I looked past them onto the dance floor. She was gone.
“I feel so stupid. I’ll be all right. I’ll just put some ice on it, right, Julia?”
“I’ll get some right now,” Liam said, and rushed off to find a waiter.
In the meantime, Clifford put his cold vodka and soda glass against my ankle.
“I’m lucky I didn’t pull or strain something out there, too,” Julia said, reaching for my hand. “The last time I danced that way was . . .”
“The first time we were here.”
“No, we weren’t as wild as that. Were we?”
I nodded.
Clifford looked up at us, smiling stupidly. He still looked a bit wobbly, I thought.
“Get up, Clifford,” Julia said, seeing the stupid grin on his face. “Wait for the ice. That’s not going to do anything for her. It’s not cold enough by now.”
He shrugged, then stood up and almost collapsed in his chair. “I think I overdid it a bit,” he muttered, closing his eyes and holding his hand over his heart.
Julia smiled at me as if we were conspirators who were succeeding. When more than ten minutes had passed, I sat up. Julia saw my concern and looked around the Underground.
“Where is he? How hard is it to get some ice?” Julia said.
She’s going to take him, I thought. God, no!
I stood up. “Find him!” I cried. Clifford opened his eyes.
“What?”
“Find Liam!” I shouted at him. “Now!”
“Easy, Lorelei,” Julia said. “What could happen to him? He’s probably just—”
“No, forget the ice. I want to go. Now,” I said firmly.
“Okay, okay. I’ll go this way, Clifford. You go that way,” she said, nodding.
My shouting and her orders sobered him quickly. He started in the direction Liam had gone. She looked back at me and then walked off, too, both of them disappearing into the thick cloud of revelers all around us.