Tangled Webb (15 page)

“You must have told her
something,
” Kelsey said.

“Not really. She knows he's Robert but she doesn't know our name for him, or my name, or where we live. She thinks I'm somebody called Marianne.”

Daddy turned to stare at me. “Is it catching?” he demanded.

For a second I just stared back at him, with my mouth ajar, then I saw what he meant. Everybody but him was now going by an alias. Sharonlee was Kelsey. Robert-Bitsy was Preston. And I was Marianne. Marianne Jackson, from Northeast Stark. I mumbled, “Well, it was the first name I thought of. I didn't want to give away anything that might—”

“She'll find us. Sooner or later,” Kelsey said. “I don't know why I thought I could get away with it. It was stupid. And now it's over. Everything's over.” She took off her wedding ring and laid it on the table in front of Daddy. “You won't want to stay married to me when you find out what all I've done—how I've lied and pretended—” Daddy grabbed the ring, jammed it back on her finger and held her hand, tight. “But Charley, I
stole
Preston,” she burst out, as if she thought Daddy hadn't heard. “I just—ran off with him. I knew it was wrong but I had to. You don't know how it was—I'd come home after school and find him wet, and miserable, and crying
kind of
hopelessly
, as if he'd been at it for hours—hungry, too, and she'd be—out like a light, there in the back bedroom. . . . I couldn't . . . I
couldn't
be there all the time. I had to work after school and Saturdays, because she'd lost the shop, and there wasn't much money left, and—”

“You were working
and
going to high school? Where was your father? Where is he now?”

“I don't know. He took off again—months before Bitsy was born. He doesn't even know he's got another kid. He figured I was old enough to get away on my own, this time. He told me to finish high school and get out, that he wasn't coming back. He left me some money. Three hundred dollars. It wasn't enough to go far, but—”

“Why in God's name didn't he take you
with
him?” demanded Daddy.

“He tried to, one time. When I was about five years old. That's when he left before. He got fed up because Mom—well, she was in one of her real bad times. He was going to get custody of me and just leave her to it. They wouldn't let him have me.”

“Who wouldn't?”

“The—you know. Authorities. A judge. You don't know my mom. She can snap herself out of it and fool anybody—social workers—anybody. Even her partner in the shop—over and over. Even Aunt Blanche sometimes. They all think
this
time it's going to work, she's going to stay sober, and a child ought to be with its mother. Well, she never sticks it out. She never has, in all my life.”

“All your life,” Daddy said softly—only to himself, I think, but Kelsey answered him.

“All I can remember. But there used to be good spells—a couple of months, maybe a whole summer. Now she can't
even get through a day. I think she's on drugs, too.” Kelsey took a long breath. “After Bitsy was born it got worse. It was as if she blamed
him
for being there, on her hands—in her way. I came home one day and she was
shaking
him. Hard. You can injure a baby's brain that way! Charley, I
had
to take him. I
had
to get him out of there.”

“Yes,” Daddy said quietly. “Of course you did. Maybe not exactly—the
way
you did. If you'd reported all this to Children's Services—”

“They'd have put him in a foster home! Given him to strangers!”

“Honey—I think they would've let you take him.”

“They wouldn't, they wouldn't!” Kelsey's voice had gone shrill, and I could see tears flashing in her eyes. “Give him to a teenager just out of high school? No chance! They wouldn't even let my own father take
me
that time, and he was a grown man, with a job! I was
losing
my job—the shop was sold—”

“All right. I see. I see.” Daddy dragged her chair closer to his and pulled her into his arms. “Go back a little. Tell me about this shop.”

It took him an hour, but he gradually coaxed it all out of her. I didn't say a word. I mean, I've already butted in too much. But we finally got the story pretty straight. Her mother—Ruth Shelby—used to be partners with a woman named Marie Morgan in this beauty shop in Boise, Idaho, when Kelsey was growing up. Blanche worked there, too, which I guess was a good thing, because she used to cover for Kelsey's mom when she'd show up drunk, or not show up at all.

“But then after work Aunt Blanche would come out to our house and bawl Mom out and swear this was the last time—and that only made Mom yell at her, and scared me, especially
when I was little, because I thought they were mad at
me
. I used to climb up in the attic and hide until my dad came home. I hate loud voices, I still go into a kind of cold sweat when people yell at each other.”

People like me, I thought guiltily. Nobody else except Preston ever raises a voice around here.

“Did your dad do anything about it when he did show up?” Daddy asked her. I think he was madder at her father than at her mother, who in my opinion was causing all the trouble.

“I don't know,” Kelsey said wearily. “Maybe he tried. He always came up to the attic and got me, and took me down to bed. But nothing ever changed. The trouble was, my dad was always gone a lot. I mean, gone from Boise.”

“What's his work?”

“I don't know what it is now. In those days he mostly drove for a big moving company, so he'd be clear across the country about half the time. Sometimes he worked for truckers around Idaho. Once he traveled with a carnival for a while—ran the Ferris wheel. I guess he's a sort of restless type.” Kelsey glanced up at Daddy with an apologetic little half-smile, then looked away again and shrugged. “Anyway, what could he do? He couldn't make Mom stop drinking. Nobody could.”

Daddy didn't say anything, and I couldn't have if I'd tried. It must have been awful to have a mother like that, and grow up like that, with nobody taking care of you, and your father never around when you needed him. When I think of Daddy—and Margo . . .

Well, anyway, last winter this Marie Morgan decided she wanted to retire, and move with her daughter and son-in-law to—guess where—Australia (just like Kelsey's made-up brother). The son-in-law was going to help run his father's sheep ranch. Marie Morgan had already bought Ruth Shelby
out of the business, a couple of years back—well, anybody could see she
had
to. So now she sold the whole shop to this chain called Mr. Pierre. They brought in their own hair stylists and gave most of the old employees notice. Blanche, for one, and Kelsey. Blanche left pretty soon—she had an offer from a Seattle wholesaler who used to supply the shop. All Kelsey had was that three hundred dollars. And Preston to rescue.

She said, “I knew I had to get him away, while I still had that money. But I didn't know where to go so nobody'd find us. Or how to stay hidden. I might never have figured it out if I hadn't—hadn't—” She swallowed. “Hadn't remembered Kay's purse.”

Kay? This was a brand-new character we'd never heard of—much less her purse. Kelsey had stopped talking.

Daddy said, “Honey? Who is Kay?”

For a minute I thought she wasn't going to tell us. It seemed harder for her than all the rest. She had to swallow again and moisten her lips. Then finally she said, “Marie Morgan's daughter—Kelsey. Her nickname's Kay.”

Daddy and I both sat there blinking at her—I was busy adding two and two and two, and so must Daddy have been, because pretty soon he said, “Kelsey Morgan. The daughter who had moved to Australia.”

“Yes.”

“With her husband—Tim Blockman?”

“Jim,” Kelsey said.

That figured. It explained her slip that time.

Daddy said, “You found a purse of hers—with her ID in it?”

“She'd
given
me the purse. She was always giving me clothes and things that she'd outgrown or was through with—all my life. Hand-me-downs, they were, but I never minded. She was
my
friend
. Like an older sister or cousin or something. You don't know how I hated to see her go.” Kelsey's voice shook a little, but pretty soon she went on. “Well—she'd given me this old summer purse along with some other things, just before she left. It was awhile before I even looked inside it. Then I noticed the lining had pulled loose, and something had slipped inside there. I fished it out—it was one of those little plastic folders, with Kay's driver's license and Social Security card and voter registration card in it. I remember she had to replace all that stuff, along in the fall—she thought she'd lost it. Of course by the time I found it she was long gone. I meant to send it to her, but I never did. Then later I—I remembered about it.”

Daddy was nodding—I expect I was, too. It was all getting pretty clear. She'd looked at that ID and simply decided to turn into Kelsey Morgan Blockman and vanish to Portland with a suddenly acquired small son.

“Why Portland?” Daddy asked her.

Kelsey shrugged. “It was the closest big town. Big enough, I
thought
, so I'd never run into anybody I ever knew. I thought Aunt Blanche was in Seattle! Besides, as soon as we got here I dyed my hair and Bitsy's too—just in case.”

It had worked too. Or would have, except for me and my meddling.

She'd had to do it. She and Preston both have red hair under the dye—his sort of rusty-gold, like that little trace I saw, and hers more copper. They'd have been easy to spot, if anybody was looking. Besides, Kay's hair was dark, and Kelsey had to match the description and picture on that driver's license. She'd already destroyed the precinct card from Kay's wallet and whatever labels there were in her own clothes; she took only dresses and skirts and things that made her look older, because
Kay was twenty-five. She even left her favorite blue sweater behind, because Kay never wore that color. She thought of
everything
. Once the dye jobs were done she made up her face and did her hair to look as much like Kay's picture as she could, and practiced Kay's signature. Then she applied for an Oregon driver's license.

“It took me a whole morning to get myself out of that motel and into the nearest DMV office. I knew I had to do it. To get my own picture on a new license. But I was so
scared.
” Kelsey closed her eyes, just thinking about it.

“They didn't question you?” asked Daddy.

She shook her head. “It was a dumb picture of Kay—it could've been anybody, almost. They barely looked at it anyway.”

“So then?”

“So then I got a cheap room. And found a day-care center. And looked for a job. I didn't dare try for the kind of work I was used to. A beauty shop's the first place anybody'd look for me. But I can type—we had word processors in high school. I got taken on at Quickhelp. That kept us going—more or less. Then one of the places I went as a temporary hired me steady. It was that title company where you came that day to install their new system.” Kelsey looked at Daddy. “And I met you.”

For a long time, nobody said anything.

“And that's the end of the story,” she finished quietly.

But it wasn't. It
isn't
. I know what Alison—or rather, Elizabeth Kenilworth—would say: It was the end of the
exposition
, the part we hadn't known before. It's the
middle
of the story, or maybe the crisis, because here we all are, with the situation as unstable as ever and nothing resolved at all. Preston is still stolen. Kelsey is still using somebody else's name and ID.
Ruth Shelby is still back in Boise, Idaho, drinking herself to death. Blanche is still trying to find her nephew. And Kelsey's carefully worked out rescue plan is ruined—thanks to meddling Juniper.

That's what I was thinking about.

Daddy wasn't. He said gently, “That's why you married me? To get a home for Preston?”

Kelsey's face sort of crumpled. She whispered, “Oh,
no
, Charley! No, no. I married you because I love you.
Please
believe me.”

I
believed her. It had been plain as daylight all along—you only had to see them together and watch her face. But Daddy was watching it now with a sort of sad, painful anxiety that made me have to look away. In fact, I decided they definitely didn't need some dumb twelve-year-old kid around right now, kibitzing. I sort of eased away and went upstairs. I don't think they missed me.

I
can't
have ruined their marriage, along with everything else. Daddy's
got
to see that to her he doesn't seem old, that he's more than just security, he's everything, a sort of perfect person. They'll work it out—I keep telling myself. But it's still not exactly—settled—even now, three whole days later. I can feel it sort of hanging in the air. I can tell Daddy's thinking
nineteen
, and feeling thirty-five going on thirty-six. Also he's probably replaying in his mind all his lecturing to me about “inventing fantasies” and “trusting each other,” and remembering how firmly he believed it—
then
—and wondering if he can forget about Kelsey's lies.

Except that they hurt Daddy so bad,
I
can forget about them—because of Preston. I'm right behind every single thing Kelsey did, though I haven't dared tell her that yet—or say much of anything else to her. I figure the less she sees of me
right now the better she'll like it. But every time I hug Preston, or hear him laughing, or try to put socks on his rubbery little feet, I'm
gladder
she did what she did, and I don't care what she had to do, to get him away. I'll bet this Kay wouldn't have minded a bit about her ID. I'll bet she'd have
helped
Kelsey pretend to be her.
I
would've.