Daughters of Eve (3 page)

Ann raised her face from her notes, looking flushed and a trifle embarrassed.

"I'm afraid that didn't sound very businesslike. I've never taken minutes before."

"They were fine," Fran said. "Are there any additions or corrections? Paula?"

"This isn't exactly an addition or correction," Paula Brummell said. "I just wanted to ask a question. Why is it we were only able to vote in three members? Is there some special reason why our number has to be kept to ten?"

"Is there, Irene?" Fran asked, turning to the teacher.

"I think the ruling is based upon the size of the student body," Irene said. "The school in Chicago was quite a bit larger than Modesta High, and we were allowed seventeen members in our Jefferson Chapter. The bylaws were formed at the national level, so we really don't have much to say about them."

"I think they're silly," Paula said. "We had six girls we wanted as members, but we could only vote in three of them. What harm would it have done to have increased our membership to thirteen?"

"Then the club wouldn't be as special," said Holly Underwood. "Daughters of Eve has a reputation. We're not just any old service group that anybody can get into, we're the group. If we started taking in a lot of extra people, it wouldn't mean as much to be a member."

"There's more to it than that," Irene said. "The importance of our group is the quality of sisterhood we offer each other, and that quality shows itself in what we do for the school. Each member's problems are the problems of all of us; we relate closely to each other with trust and loyalty and caring. When you expand membership, that personal element lessens. Pretty soon the group splits into subgroups who care more about themselves than about the membership as a whole."

"That makes sense," Fran said. "And now, I wonder if our prospective members have any questions before their initiation."

There was a pause. Then Ruth raised her hand.

"I've got sort of a problem about the meeting time," she said. "Is it always after school on Mondays?"

"It always has been," Fran told her. "Do you have a conflict?" It would be surprising, she thought, if a sophomore had gotten herself involved in extracurricular activities so quickly. "Would another afternoon be better?"

Ruth hesitated, then shook her head. "No, not really, I guess. It's okay. I'll work things out."

"Do you have any questions, Laura?"

"No," Laura Snow said softly. Her eyes were glowing.

"Jane?"

Jane Rheardon gave a little start,' as though her mind had been in other places. "I'm sorry, I missed the question."

"Do you have any questions about the club?" Fran asked patiently.

"No," Jane said. "I don't have any questions at all."

Something is wrong.

Wrong, how?

I don't know. I can't put my finger on it.

Then it can't be anything very important, can it?

It was a habit of Tammy Carncross's to have discussions with herself within her head. Sometimes she felt there must really be two parts of her, two distinct personalities, one the thinking part, one going strictly on emotions. As she sat now, silent, watching the initiation take place, the two voices within her head picked back and forth at each other like bickering children, and Tammy longed to tell them, "Hush. Be quiet. I'm trying to enjoy the ceremony."

The shades at the art-room windows had been drawn, and three white candles had been lighted. Before them, Fran had placed an open Bible from which she read aloud:

"And Ruth said, 'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.'"

It was a moving ceremony. At last year's initiation Tammy had found her eyes filling with tears at the beauty of the ancient words as they described the devotion of one woman to another and her decision to follow her friend to a strange and foreign land rather than let her journey there alone. They were no less beautiful now. The three new members stood with bent heads, and the light from the candles flickered softly upon their faces and threw leaping shadows on the far wall.

"Such is the spirit of sisterhood—"

Something is wrong.

You have no reason for thinking that.

I have this feeling—

At home they joked a lot about "Tammy's feelings." "Our oracle," her father called her in the same fond way he called his older daughter, Tammy's sister, Marnie, "our brain." It was a form of teasing, but there was just enough truth behind the nicknames to make them more than casual. Marnie had aced herself into a scholarship to Northwestern, the same college from which their father had graduated, and when Tammy had "feelings" her family listened even when they laughed. Her mother liked to tell about a time when her younger daughter was three and had a "funny feeling" about the toilet in the ground-floor bathroom. "It feels mad at us," she had announced with great earnestness. The next morning they had awakened to find the toilet had backed up overnight and the entire first floor was inches deep in water, and Mrs. Carncross, who was a writer, had written the incident up as a short feature for the "Out of the Mouths of Babes" section of a national magazine.

Tammy herself could not remember that occasion, it was too far in her past, but over the years she had come to accept her "feelings" as a natural extension of her thought process. When she took a school exam, she would think through each problem to a logical answer, and then, before writing this down, she would ask herself, "But, what do I feel?" If the thought and the feeling were not compatible, she would redo the problem.

Tammy also had feelings about people. These did not come to her often, but when they did occur they were rarely misleading. Two years ago she had been one of the girls standing before the row of candles, listening to the story of Ruth. There had been four girls to be initiated, and Tammy had known none of the others. Shy by nature, and awed by the solemnity of the occasion, she had been standing with lowered eyes, with her full attention upon the reading, when she had become suddenly aware of the girl standing next to her and of another girl at the end of the row just outside the circle of light.

They will be my friends, Tammy had thought.

The knowledge had come to her with such certainty that her lips had curved involuntarily into a smile, and Marnie, who was then president, had paused in her reading and frowned at her reprovingly. "You were laughing during the Bible reading," she had accused later, and Tammy had said, "No, I wasn't, Marn. I was just feeling happy."

It had not happened overnight. The bonds between them had grown slowly. But now, in their senior year, Ann Whitten and Kelly Johnson were her closest friends.

Today, with the same intensity of feeling, Tammy knew that something was very wrong. There was an alien presence in the room. It moved like a shadow between her eyes and the flickering candles, and though the room was warm, actually quite hot with the windows covered and the people within it gathered so close together, Tammy shivered.

What could it be—?

And then she saw it, thick and dark, dripping from one of the candles like melted wax. The word flashed through her mind like a high-pitched scream-BLOOD!

Could nobody else see it? Evidently not. Or perhaps they simply did not want to see.

Fran had laid the Bible aside now and was explaining the meaning of the pledge. "It shows us in the Bible that Eve was the universal mother, so we are all, in a sense, her daughters, and by acknowledging this we claim each other as sisters. Just as Ruth was willing to sacrifice her personal comfort, her home ties and her chance for remarriage in order to be supportive of Naomi when she was lonely and in need, so do we, within this sisterhood, promise to make the same sacrifices for each other. Do you so vow?"

Three voices—softly—"I do."

"Then let us welcome our three new sisters into the light!"

Someone switched on the overhead. The room leaped into brilliance.

The candle shafts gleamed white and pure.

Tammy closed her eyes and pressed her hands against the lids. It had not been real, there was no blood. Her mind had been playing a trick upon her. But there in her self-created darkness, the bleeding taper reappeared, etched against the inside of her lids, and a terrible warning kept shrilling through her brain.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

"Is something wrong, Tammy?" Irene Stark asked her worriedly. "Are you feeling sick?"

Tammy lowered her hands from her face and blinked at the brightness. The other girls were all out of their seats now, gathered in a noisy, welcoming group around the new ones. The room was filled with laughter and happy chatter and hugs.

"Are you sick?" Irene asked again, and Tammy nodded.

"It's so hot in here," she said weakly. "I think I'd better go out—where it's not so hot." She got up from her seat and crossed the room and opened the door. The air from the hallway felt cool against her face.

"Hey, Tammy, where are you going?" Kelly Johnson called out to her, but she did not answer. Halfway down the hall she broke into a run. She reached the door at the end and hurled herself against it, pushing it wide, and a moment later she was outside, running through the golden sweetness of the September afternoon.

CHAPTER 3

Ann Whitten recognized the sound of the pickup before it came around the bend and smiled to herself in the darkness. Half an hour late as always, she thought without rancor, and gave the floor a little shove to set the porch swing to rhythmic creaking. She focused her eyes upon the curve of the road and waited for the lights to appear like two great cat eyes slashing through the black. When they did she was only mildly surprised to see that one of them had a drooping lid.

Dave gets one thing working and something else goes wrong, she thought with a sigh as the truck came groaning into the driveway and pulled to a stop behind her father's Plymouth. It gave a roar and a gasp and went sputtering into silence; the cat eyes blinked once and went out.

The door of the cab opened and slammed closed, and a moment later Dave was coming across the lawn, the white splash of his shirt catching the light from the living-room windows. As he mounted the porch steps and turned to press the doorbell, Ann said, "Boo!"

He gave a start, and she laughed with satisfaction. "Did I scare you?"

"Like to give me a heart attack, that's all." Dave crossed the porch and groped his way to the swing. "Got room there for a friend?"

"I might have. It depends who it is."

"Somebody with straw in his hair okay?"

"Oh—him." Ann pretended to be mulling the situation over. "I'll have to give this some thought. Am I really that sort of girl?"

Dave took the teasing good-naturedly. "Well, while you're thinking, shove over and let a weary man sit down."

The swing set up a chatter as he settled himself beside her and then grew quiet as the motion stopped. Dave's arm came around her shoulders and drew her against him, and with the ease of long familiarity Ann laid her head back against it and raised her face for his loss.

"Mmmmmm," she said contentedly. "You smell like toothpaste and Prell. You don't have straw in your hair at all. In fact, you must have just washed it"

"That's what took me so long," Dave said. "I couldn't come over here fresh from feeding the pigs, could I?"

"I suppose you could have," Ann said, "but I'm just as glad you didn't. Say, do you know one of your headlights runs on park?"

"Yeah, I realized it when I started out tonight, but it was either drive with it that way or stay home. I'll do something about it tomorrow. That is, I will if I get time. Darn it, the days go by fast! How was school?"

"Okay," Ann said. "I showed Irene—Miss Stark—my sketches from this summer."

"What did she say about them?"

"She liked them," Ann said. "Especially the one of you on the tractor and that last one I did with the fence in the foreground with all the crows lined up along it and the pasture behind it and then the house. She said that had good perspective. She wanted to know what kind of art training I've had."

"So you told her 'none'?"

"Well, none except just the regular school classes. But I have done a lot of work on my own, you know. I told her I've got a closet full of sketchbooks that go back to grammar-school days, and that I've been working in watercolor for a couple of years now. I said I'd bring some of the paintings in to show her."

"That's nice. Maybe she'll give you an A."

"She kept the sketches," Ann said.

She would have liked to have carried it further, to have described the way Irene had sat there studying the drawings, her dark brows drawn together and that strong, intense face taut with concentration. There had been other students in the room waiting to talk with her, but for that moment Ann had felt that only she existed in Irene's world.

"These are strong," Irene had said. "Especially the one with the tractor. I like the lines of the man's shoulders. I'm glad you didn't try to fill in the face."