The Unwanted (42 page)

Slowly, tears welling in her eyes, she began telling Rosemary what had happened that morning.

Cassie moved slowly along the beach, oblivious to the terns and gulls wheeling overhead and the sandpipers skittering ahead of her as they searched the tidelands for morsels of food. The storm had passed, and the sea was calm now. Sumi padded along at Cassie’s feet, darting off every few seconds in pursuit of one of the birds, only to be driven back by the gently lapping surf.

She’d had another fight with Rosemary that morning, and she knew she should go back home and apologize to her.

Except that the Winslows’ house wasn’t home anymore, and she knew that Rosemary didn’t want her there. Home was the cabin in the marsh now, the cabin Miranda had lived in and that she knew someday—somehow—she would live in too.

Last night, even after Eric left, it had felt right to her.

Safe.

And then …

And then, what? She knew what had happened in the marsh, knew that Sumi had attacked Lisa. But why? She wasn’t even angry at Lisa anymore, and when she’d stopped Sumi in the park yesterday morning, the cat had obeyed. But last night Sumi had attacked.

There had to be a reason.

She turned away from the beach and started out into the marsh, carefully avoiding the place where they’d found Lisa
early that morning. There were still a lot of people there, talking among themselves. As Cassie passed, they fell silent.

She could feel them watching her.

Just as they had watched Miranda.

The hostility coming from them was almost palpable. Cassie shuddered, then reached down and picked up Sumi, cuddling the cat close. Why did they hate her so much? She hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, not really.

Except that she had. Deep inside, she had let herself get angry with Mr. Simms, and with Lisa Chambers.

She had let them hurt her, and she had struck out at them. She mustn’t do it again. Never again.

Except there was still Mr. Cavanaugh.

He wanted to kill her. Last night, in fact, he thought he had killed her. She’d known it when Sumi came back and crept into her arms, and the images had come into her mind. She had seen Eric’s father standing above Lisa and felt the hatred coming from him. But it wasn’t Lisa he had hated.

It was her.

And then, this morning, when she’d seen him staring at her from Eric’s window, she’d felt it again, felt it even more strongly than last night.

She came to the low rise on which the cabin stood, and stepped into the circle of trees surrounding it. Almost immediately a feeling of peace came over her. Then a thought came into her mind, fully formed.

He can’t get me here. As long as I stay here, he can’t get me.

Silently, cradling Sumi against her chest, she went into the cabin.

Cassie didn’t know how long she’d been alone in Miranda’s house before Eric arrived. She was sitting in the rocking chair, her eyes closed, listening to the calming sounds of the marsh. It was only when Sumi stirred in her lap that she sensed his presence.

She opened her eyes to find him standing in the doorway, watching her.

“I know what happened,” Eric said. “And I know why he hates you so much. You’re part of it, you see. You and your mother.”

As Cassie listened, Eric began to tell her what had happened that day so many years ago. The day they had both met Miranda for the first time.

“Where are you going?” Rosemary demanded.

“I’m going to find Cassie!” Keith replied, his voice trembling with rage. “I’m her father—what else do you expect me to do?”

Rosemary felt a lump rise in her throat. “I expect you to help me try to figure out what’s happening. Isn’t that why you came back? To help me?”

“I came back to help Cassie,” Keith shot back. He’d only been home for an hour, but after listening to Rosemary’s story, he wasn’t sure he should have come back at all. Four perfectly good customers, and now they were all furious because he’d insisted on rushing home when Rosemary had called him on the radio that morning. And for what! Some cockamamie story that Cassie had somehow managed to kill Lisa Chambers last night.

“You mean you actually believe it?” he’d asked when Rosemary had told him everything she knew about what happened. “You really believe Cassie could have had anything to do with any of this?”

“I only know what Gene Templeton told me,” Rosemary said miserably. “They found cat hairs under Lisa’s fingernails, and the cuts on her face matched the ones on Harold Simms. That’s when I decided to call you. And if you’d seen her last night when she went out—”

That was when Keith lost his temper. “So now the story is that Cassie sent the cat to attack Harold Simms and kill Lisa Chambers? For Christ’s sake, Rosemary! You’re an intelligent woman. How can you buy crap like that?”

“It’s not
my
crap!” Rosemary shot back. “All I know is what Paul Samuels said. Lisa Chambers is dead, Keith, and it doesn’t matter what you think—everyone else in town already believes Cassie had something to do with it!”

“So this whole town’s gone nuts in the last two days!”

“Maybe it has,” Rosemary agreed, her voice etched with acid. “But Lisa’s still dead, and Ed Cavanaugh was trying to kill Eric and Cassie! Not just Eric! Cassie too! Why won’t you
face the fact that ever since Cassie’s been here things have gone wrong, and somehow she’s always at the center of it?”

Keith had stood up from the table so abruptly that his chair crashed over onto the floor. He snatched his coat off the hook in the service porch and was halfway out the door, his eyes blazing, when he heard Jennifer’s plaintive voice.

“Don’t,” the little girl said, her chin trembling as she struggled against her own tears. “Please don’t yell at each other. Please?”

Keith’s and Rosemary’s eyes met.

“What are we doing?” Rosemary finally asked. “Dear God, Keith, what are we doing to ourselves?” Then, as Jennifer ran to her mother, Keith put his arms around both of them.

“It’s going to be all right,” he told them. “We’ll be all right, and Cassie will be all right too. We won’t let anything happen to any of us.” He gave them a hug, then released them and finished pulling his jacket on. When he spoke, his voice was gentle. “I have to go see if I can find her,” he said, reaching out to touch Rosemary’s cheek. “I guess I’m just starting to understand what the last couple of days have been like for you. But think what they’ve been like for Cassie, darling. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I don’t believe Cassie would willingly hurt anyone. I just don’t believe it.” And then he was gone.

Keith paused at the foot of the low rise upon which Miranda Sikes’s cabin stood. Cassie was there—he could sense it even before he saw the thin wisp of smoke drifting up from the chimney.

And on the roof of the cabin, eyeing him warily, the white hawk was perched, its feathers ruffling as it moved restlessly from one foot to the other.

“Cassie?” Keith called. Then again, “Cassie! It’s your father!”

He took a single step forward, then froze as the hawk launched itself from the rooftop, found the wind, and began spiraling upward. From the cabin he heard a single word.

“No!”

Instantly the hawk changed course, dropping out of the air to settle back onto the peak of the roof. Only when it had
landed did Keith shift his eyes from the bird to the figure on the porch of the cabin.

It was Cassie, her brows knit into an uncertain frown. She was watching him warily.

“It’s me, Punkin,” Keith said quietly.

For a moment Cassie was silent, and when she spoke, her voice was heavy with suspicion. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I know what everybody thinks, but I didn’t do anything.”

Keith felt his heart twist with pain. He wanted to go to her, take her in his arms, hold her. “I know,” he said, the words quavering as he struggled to hold his emotions in check. “That’s why I came out here. I came to help you, sweetheart.” Almost involuntarily his eyes flicked upward toward the watchful hawk. “Can I come up there?”

Time seemed to stand still as Cassie watched her father, and then she nodded.

Feeling the hawk’s eyes on him every step of the way, Keith climbed the hill and stepped into the cabin.

“I don’t know what to say,” Keith told his daughter an hour later. He felt sick as all the pieces of the puzzle finally began to come together. No wonder Diana had been jealous of him: she’d been certain he’d been doing the same things she’d been doing. “I never knew any of it. If I’d known, I never would have let your mother take you away.”

“But why did she even want to?” Cassie asked, her voice quavering. “If she didn’t care enough about me even to watch me on the beach, why did she want to take me with her?”

Keith shook his head helplessly. “It wasn’t you, honey. It was never you. She just didn’t want me to have you. She knew how much I loved you. And she knew how much it hurt me when she took you.”

“And she never told you what happened?” Cassie asked, her disbelief apparent. “She never told you I almost drowned in the quicksand?”

“She couldn’t,” Keith replied bitterly. “She knew if she did, I’d have wanted to know how you got lost in the first place. And if I’d found
that
out, she never would have been able to take you away from me.” He turned to Eric, who was
sitting silently at the table. “I don’t know what to say to you either. All those years …”

Eric spoke in a nearly toneless voice. “Maybe Miranda shouldn’t have saved us. Maybe she should have just let us drown. Nobody cared. Nobody at all.”

“That’s not true—” Keith started to protest, then changed his mind. It was the children who had lived through all those years, who had received the beatings, and who had lived without love. How
could
they believe that anybody had cared?

“What was she like?” he asked softly. “What was Miranda really like?”

“She was my friend,” Cassie replied. Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered those few hours she’d spent with Miranda. “She listened to me. When I talked to her, she knew exactly how I felt. She knew how alone I was, and how different I was, and how much—” Her voice broke, but she forced herself to go on. “She knew how much I hurt.” She met her father’s eyes. “She wasn’t crazy, Daddy. She wasn’t crazy at all. She just didn’t have any friends, except Sumi and Kiska. That’s why she knew how I felt. She always felt the same way. And she never wanted to hurt anybody either. She told me that just because people didn’t understand me, it wasn’t any reason to hurt them.”

In her lap Sumi meowed softly, and Cassie gently scratched his ears. “That’s why she gave me Sumi,” she went on. “She wanted me to have a friend that really understood me.”

Keith felt a chill as he remembered what Rosemary had told him when he came home. “Understands you,” he said quietly. “You don’t really mean the cat understands what you say, do you?”

Cassie hesitated, then nodded. “He understands what I’m feeling, and he does what I want him to do. So does Kiska. That’s why he didn’t go after you. I made him stop.”

“But, honey, that’s crazy,” Keith began, then wished he could take back the words when he saw the pain in Cassie’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “It’s just—well, people can’t really do things like that.”

Cassie’s eyes met his unwaveringly. “Most people can’t,” she said. “But Miranda could, and I can too. The animals were all she had, and she left them to me.” She swallowed
hard, then forced herself to go on. “That’s what I did to Mr. Simms. I—I sent Sumi after him. I didn’t really know I could, but …” She fell silent, watching her father fearfully.

Keith said nothing for several long minutes. If it was true, what did it mean? And was it really true? He had to know. “Show me,” he said at last.

Cassie blinked uncertainly. “H-how?”

“Make him attack me. If you can make him attack me, I’ll believe you. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

Cassie glanced at Eric but said nothing. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Cassie whispered, looking back to her father.

“Make him attack me, then make him stop,” Keith pressed. “If I’m going to help you, I have to know what happened.”

Cassie stared at him for several seconds without speaking. Then her eyes closed.

She can’t do it, Keith thought. She thinks she can but—

In a sudden flash of movement Sumi hissed angrily and tensed in Cassie’s lap. As Keith stared in shock, the cat hurled himself toward him. A screech of fury roiled from his throat, and his lips curled back from his fangs. Keith threw up his hands to protect his face, but just before the cat struck him, he heard once more the single word that Cassie had spoken earlier on the porch.

“No!”

The shriek of attack died in Sumi’s throat, and he dropped lightly into Keith’s lap. His tail twitched once or twice, then he licked Keith’s hand and settled down, purring contentedly.

For a long time no one said anything. Then Cassie broke the silence.

“I didn’t kill Lisa, Daddy,” she said softly. “Really, I didn’t.”

Keith hesitated, then nodded. “I believe you, Punkin,” he said. “I believe you.”

Eric said nothing at all.

Rosemary was playing Chinese checkers with Jennifer on the floor of the den when the doorbell rang. She was tempted not to answer it.

All day, as the rumors had spread through the village, she’d seen a steady trickle of people passing by the house—
people who didn’t live in the neighborhood and didn’t ordinarily go for walks along Alder Street. But today had been different, and finally Jennifer, looking curiously out the window, had asked what they were doing.

“They’re just looking, honey,” Rosemary had assured her. “I guess they just don’t have anything better to do.”

“Can I go out?” Jennifer had asked.

Rosemary shook her head, knowing all too well the sort of things Jennifer was likely to overhear on the streets that day. And so after Keith left, she’d settled down with Jennifer in the den, partly to keep the little girl entertained, but also, she knew, to keep her own mind off everything that had happened.

The bell rang again. “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Jennifer asked.