Charlotte’s Story (40 page)

“He’s dead.” Hugh Walters had gently lifted the half-mask from Press’s face and closed his eyes. It was a peculiar thing to do, given that he was a policeman and Press was a victim, but it sent a signal that he knew Press’s death couldn’t be handled as a regular crime. Hugh’s pleasant face looked bewildered. I had liked him, and almost felt sorry for him until I remembered how many crimes he must have covered up for Press. How he had stood by like the others while I lay drugged and exposed.

J.C. spoke from halfway across the room, where she stood against a wall, her hands pressed behind her as though she were ready to launch herself into one of the windows opposite. Her voice was now clear, despite the injuries to her face.

“Obviously, he had a terrible accident.”

Rachel, who was clinging to Jack, gasped.

“That’s insane. She killed him.” She pointed at me. “She’s got a goddamn knife. Look at her!”

I looked down. The jeweled peacock knife was in my right hand. Both the blade and my hand were covered with blood. A later glance at one of the tall, elaborately framed mirrors standing against the walls would reveal that my tunic sweater and bare legs were also bloody.

“You bitch!”

Jack held Rachel by the arms while she screamed unrepeatable profanities at me.

It was the roses I remembered. Not the knife. I knew that I was somehow responsible for the blood covering my husband and my own body. Had the roses been my own delusion? Certainly the shaking of the house had not. It had driven everyone else from the room and out of the house. Both the pocket door to the hall and the door to the outer stairway stood open—one to the distant light of the chandelier, the other to the night.

It certainly hadn’t been I who had propelled him across the room.

“That’s not what I saw,” J.C. said, calmly. “I saw him fall off the stage, drunk, onto one of the tools the workmen left behind.”

I could have wept with relief at her words. If only I had trusted her before it had become too late.

Now Rachel turned her attention to J.C. But before she could get a word out, Jack jerked her backwards.

“Be quiet, Rachel. Just shut up!”

He looked like a teenager playing dress-up in his silver leotard and tights. His wings were still stiff and cartoonish. There was something more than anger in his face. There was fear. Press was no longer there to protect them.

Hugh stood up.

“Yes. That’s exactly right.” He walked toward Jack and Rachel. “You need to get her under control, Jack. In fact, just take a quick look at him.” Here, he inclined his head toward Press. “Call the death. We’ll get a certificate later. Let’s get this place cleaned up and I’ll get the coroner and the funeral-home people here.”

“The coroner?” J.C. had crossed the room to come and stand beside me. When she touched my back, I felt myself shaking beneath her hand. I wasn’t sure I would ever stop shaking.

“It won’t be a problem.” Hugh’s voice was low. Not quite ashamed, but neither was it triumphant. “If that sounds good to you, Charlotte.”

I nodded. Press was dead, and yet his influence was still making sure that everything would be taken care of. No one who had been there that night would want it known that they’d been there—or what they’d been up to with Press and, earlier, Zion Heaster. They would want to keep their secrets and, in return, would keep mine.

After the wake, J.C. found me alone in the kitchen, sitting at the table in the butler’s pantry. There had been a frost the night
before, and all of the more tender-leafed herbs in the garden outside the window had succumbed. The wilted plants were like slender, ruined creatures fighting to stay upright. I’d been thinking of Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit and the animals I’d planned to paint on the walls of the ballroom. I wouldn’t bother to try to have it painted again. The house obviously didn’t want the room to change. Whatever—whoever—was attached to it would never let it.

J.C. put a glass of Scotch along with a small glass of sherry on the table, and touched me on the shoulder as she sat down. Her makeup was heavy, but the swelling had abated so that her cheek and lips looked almost normal again. She kept her voice low. “I know we’ve said just about everything, Charlotte. Thank you for forgiving me.”

I nodded. We had said enough the night before as we sat talking in the morning room until nearly two
A.M.
She was ashamed of her affair with Press but had the dignity not to try to excuse it in light of the bizarre changes that had come over him during the past months. He’d brought her down, secretly, from the hotel a couple of times for the “parties” in Rachel and Jack’s barn, which explained Rachel’s animosity toward her. Of course Rachel would have been jealous. Hearing that, I confessed that I was rather glad she had pretended not to remember Rachel’s name during our chance meeting at The Grange (had it only been the week before?). At that point, anything that made Rachel miserable was fine with me.

But it wasn’t until she told me that Press had hinted that he was going to eventually kill me that I understood how much J.C. had risked. When she told him he was going too far, that it all needed to stop, he had beaten her up and, with Terrance’s help, taken her to the rooms below the house. I never learned the details of what he’d done to her down there over those two days. The distant, guarded look in her eyes told me enough. When I asked how she’d broken free, she said that she believed Olivia had somehow helped her
to escape. Knowing all that Olivia had done for me, how could I doubt her?

“Everything’s packed. The car from The Grange will pick me up at two.” J.C. looked at her watch. “Are you sure you and Michael don’t want to get away for a while? The offer’s still open if you want to stay at my cottage on the hotel grounds. I’ll be back in New York in two days. No one will bother you.”

“Thank you. We’re going to stay here with my father and Nonie. Michael’s been through enough these past few months. And now Press is gone. I can’t take him away. He doesn’t really know anywhere else.”

She slid the glass of sherry in front of me.

“I think you should have several of these.”

I shook my head.

“You didn’t eat any breakfast either, did you? At least it’s something.”

Marlene had come from the dining room into the other end of the kitchen with a tray full of dishes. I lowered my voice so she wouldn’t hear me, but it didn’t really matter. I wouldn’t be able to hide it much longer, anyway. “Just the smell of wine turns my stomach. I think I’m pregnant.”

J.C. covered her mouth. “Oh, God, Charlotte. How is that possible? Not. . . .”

“No. At least two months. That’s when I started getting sick with both Eva and Michael. I wasn’t paying any attention to the dates. I guess I assumed the stress had affected my—you know. My cycle.”

“What will you do?”

“Michael will be happy. He’s missed Eva so much. Maybe it will be a boy. He’d like that.”

When she leaned forward, I saw a glimmer of the old, cynical J.C. in her eyes. “Will you name him after Press?”

I laughed. It seemed like such a peculiar question to ask so early. But people would want to know.

“Randolph.”

“You can’t! That’s . . . I don’t know. It sounds insane, Charlotte. Why would you do that?”

“I’m staying here, aren’t I? It’s only fair that if I’m to stay and try to heal this house, heal my family—or what’s left of it—then another Randolph might help make it right.”

“I don’t think you should do this to yourself.”

“I’m not doing anything to myself. I’m going to live my life and raise my children here, where they belong. It would take a hell of a lot to drive me away now.” And I meant it.

Michael and I watched from the front door as the driver helped J.C. into the long black Lincoln that would take her back to The Grange. She turned to wave from the back window as they headed down the drive. Michael blew her a kiss. The only time I ever saw her again was at The Grange when we both chanced to be there at the same time. She had said she would visit us, but I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to come back to Bliss House.

The day after she left, Nonie and I went down the hidden staircase to the rooms below. I was trembling. Nonie was silent.

The rooms told a vile story. There were magazines and books and photographs and drawings—filthy things. Much of it was even older than Press. But he’d clearly spent a lot of time there. There was evidence of women besides J.C., too. Or at least one. I suspected it was Rachel.

The rooms could be reached from the outside by a tunnel that began behind a door hidden in a wall of the springhouse. I sealed it up myself, not wanting to trust the job to anyone else. Then I closed the panel beside the fireplace and locked the ballroom doors.

No one is allowed in the ballroom at all. The boys, teenagers now, know this. We have rules. Rules to keep them safe.

You will wonder about Rachel, of course.

Old Gate is a small town, so we get in each other’s way sometimes. But we’ve developed the skill of not actually seeing each other even when we’re in the same store or restaurant. I’m not sure what she tells people if they ask about our friendship. I just pretend I haven’t heard and change the subject.

That following spring, I saw Holly at a garden party. She was showing another woman a picture of Seraphina, and exclaiming what a wonderful mother Rachel was becoming.

Something rose inside me, a desperate desire to tell her to remind Rachel to keep her little girl away from the geese that settled so prettily beside her pond. I wanted to imagine the sick fear in Rachel’s eyes. Does she love Seraphina now? Is Seraphina precious to her, now that she will never have another child for Press? Somehow I doubt it. Rachel is Rachel.

We hold each other at bay: a murder for a murder. It would always be so.

But does she ever wonder about Press? Where he is?

I have no need to wonder. I know he is here. With me. With us.

Epilogue

The May sun beats upon the roof and windows and solid outer walls, and I can feel it all. But the sun and the heat can’t harm me. It may weather the brick and fade the gray tiles, but that is nothing. I am here inside the house. I am one with this house.

I feel the car approaching, the flattening of the shells and stones in the drive. My sense of them is faint at first; but as the car comes closer, I can smell the heated exhaust, the odor of disinfectant, of a wet diaper, of Charlotte’s hairspray and her favorite hand lotion. I can smell my child, new and alive. They are driving carefully with their precious cargo, as I would have them. Charlotte comes to me scented and lovely and cruel, as I always knew she might be. Did she imagine that I thought her helpless? I feel her strength as she approaches, the strength that threatened me, that took my life. But I am not interested in you now, my faithless wife.

I watch as that filthy saint, Roman Carter, limps to open the car door for her, and my anger swells. Can he feel it? See how complacent he is, smiling at my wife and new son. His sanctimony smells of dried ink and stale coffee. Jack, my dearest Jack should
have killed him with that car. My hatred makes me want to tear loose an arrow of ironwork from an upper floor and shoot it into his heart. Let him collapse on my step, his eyes open to the thing that killed him, understanding. Finally understanding. But I will do nothing now. He will wait, as I have waited.

Now she puts that lovely leg out of the car. Still, I would touch that leg, wrap it in mine, and press naked against that yielding ivory skin. I might whisper in her ear, telling her what I was about to do so I could see the terror in her once-adoring eyes, then tear at the curve of her proud neck with my teeth, rending her flesh, exposing her lying throat to the flies.

But I am patient. I have no need of that sort of violence. Once I needed a stage, but now my breaths, my words are the creaking of a door and a draft in the great hall where I once loved to play. My sighs are the glinting of the stars covering the dome. My audience is every thing, every person who lives and has died here. And there are the others. The ones who have never lived but are welcome in this place.

Look how carefully she cradles my newborn son, tucking the corners of the blanket around him despite the heat rising in waves from the hood of the ticking car and the patio stones. So precious to her. Precious to me.