Wild Orchids

by Jude Deveraux

  Chuck put his head back, closed one eye, and said, “Me thinks thou art trying to escape from something.”

  “Yeah,” Jackie said. “Work.”

  Everyone, including me, laughed, and I noticed both Allie and DeeAnne looking from Jackie to me speculatively. Before they started matchmaking, I said to Allie, “So tell us about old man Belcher’s saintly son.”

  “Saintly, ha!” Allie said, sipping her wine. “Edward Belcher wanted to marry Harriet Cole only because the town was named after her family. He seemed to think that uniting the descendants of two of the seven founding families would raise his status. He had his eye on the governorship.”

  I was thinking of this in writer terms. “Those seven families seem to be important here in Cole Creek,” I said. “Besides old man Belcher and Miss Essie Lee, are many of them left in town?”

  “Yes,” Allie said softly. “Tessa and me.” She looked at me. “And Rebecca is from one of the families.”

  DeeAnne looked at Allie. “It’s amazing that any of you are still here.”

  The smile left Allie’s face. For a moment she hid her face behind the big balloon wineglass, and when she set it down, she was solemn. “There’s a blood descendant of every family still in Cole Creek. Except for the Coles, that is. The most important family is missing.”

  Her tone seemed to take the joviality out of the party, and I started to ask what was going on, but Jackie nudged me under the table.

  “So tell us about this great love story,” Jackie said brightly.

  “There’s nothing to tell. Sometime in the 1970s, fat old Edward decided he was going to merge his family name with the Coles’ through marriage, and rename the town Heritage. But Harriet eloped with a handsome young man and had a baby. The end.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked, watching Allie closely and wondering if she’d give the same answer as Miss Essie Lee had.

  “I don’t really know.”

  She’s lying, I thought. But what was she lying about? And why?

  “Edward died not long afterward, and I think Harriet did, too,” Allie said at last. “And I think Harriet’s handsome young husband left her.”

  “What happened to their child?” Jackie asked quietly and I hoped I was the only one who heard the odd tone in her voice.

  Allie finished her glass of wine. “I have no idea. She didn’t grow up in Cole Creek, that’s for sure. No more direct descendants of the Coles live here, and I’d stake my life on that!” She said the last so emphatically that the rest of us looked at each other as though to say, What was that all about?

  Except for Jackie. She was sitting very still and I was willing to bet that she was doing some subtraction in her head. Seventies, Allie had said. Harriet Cole had had a baby, a “she,” in the 1970s and her young husband had left her.

  Jackie had been born in the seventies and her father had left her mother. And they had lived in Cole Creek when Jackie was very young.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jackie

  I didn’t want to tell Ford but there was a big part of me that wanted to run to the nearest bus station and get as far away from Cole Creek as I possibly could. There were too many strange things happening to me, too many things that I seemed to remember.

  On Sunday I put on a 1940s dress and walked to church. It was about three miles from the house but I “knew” a shortcut through the woods. When I got there, I saw the charred stone foundation and brick chimney of what had once been a large building, and I felt sad that “my” church had burned down.

  When I got back to Ford’s house, he asked me if I’d enjoyed the service, but I just mumbled a response and went up to my room. I changed clothes and cooked a big dinner, but I couldn’t eat much. How had I known my way through the woods? When had I been in this town before? Oh, Lord, what had happened to me here?

  “Want to talk about whatever’s bothering you?” Ford asked.

  He was being sweet but I didn’t want to tell him anything. What could I say? That I had a “feeling?” Kirk had laughed at me the one time I’d said I’d a “feeling” about something.

  In the afternoon I puttered in the garden while Ford watched some long movie on TV, and I wished I’d invited Allie and Tessa over. Long ago I’d found that sticking my nose into other people’s business made me stop contemplating my own problems. I could have spent the afternoon asking Allie why she didn’t leave Cole Creek when her husband was transferred. And in spite of my vow never to speak of it to anyone, maybe I could tell her what Kirk had done to me. But then, I was ready to talk about anything except how I was feeling in this little town.

  When Ford spoke from behind me, I jumped.

  “You scared me,” I said, jamming the little trowel into the dirt around the roses.

  “Why don’t you call your old friends?” he asked as he sat down. “Have a few laughs.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “Here, move your foot. You’re on my glove.”

  He moved his foot the smallest distance possible to get it off my glove, then looked up at the sky through the trees. “It’s nice here.”

  I stopped gouging out weeds and sat down on the ground. “Yeah, it is.” Mountain climate had always been my favorite: The sun was warm, but the altitude made it cool in the shade.

  “What happened at church today?” he asked, making me look at him.

  He had really intense eyes that could bore into a person. “Same ol’, same ol’,” I said. “You know what church services are like. Or do you?”

  “I know enough to know that no preacher ever let out early. So what happened that you didn’t stay for the whole service?”

  I opened my mouth to emit some quickly-made-up lie, but I stopped when something big and heavy came sailing through the trees. As it whistled through the air, we both ducked for cover.

  Actually, I ducked and Ford sort of did a swan dive out of his chair to land on top of me. I’ll give it to him that he was protective of women.

  “Sorry,” he said as he rolled off of me. “I heard—Then I—” He looked embarrassed.

  When I got up, I had to take a couple of breaths. He’s tall and he’s heavy, but, worse, my trowel had been under me. I felt my ribs. I didn’t think they were cracked, but I was going to have a beaut of a bruise there tomorrow.

  Ford was searching through a thorny tangle of shrubbery as he looked for the projectile that had come sailing toward us. Wincing at my bruised ribs, I got up to help him look.

  We saw it at the same time: a big rock wrapped in two-inch-wide clear tape so we could see the note underneath. Using his pocketknife, he cut the tape away.

  Both of us held our breaths as we looked at the note. “Time Magazine,” it read, “in July 1992.”

  For a moment he and I looked at each other in puzzlement, our thoughts reflected in each other’s eyes. Who had thrown this rock at us? Why? Should we have gone after the perpetrator before we searched for the rock? And what did this date mean?

  “Too bad it’s Sunday,” Ford said. “The library is closed today or we could—”

  The same idea hit us both at the same time. There had been hundreds of old magazines—Time included—stacked in the entrance to the house when we moved in.

  Ford looked at me in horror. “You didn’t—?” he whispered, meaning, Did I throw them away?

  No, I hadn’t. I’d planned to give them to Nate’s grandmother to sell over the Internet but hadn’t yet. “Servant’s bedroom. Attic,” I said over my shoulder as I started running for the nearest door into the house.

  Ford, with his longer legs, got there at the same time in spite of my head start. “Ow!” I yelled as he tried to push into the house first. “My ribs.” Immediately, he stopped pushing, so I slipped under his arm to reach the stairs before he did, but he took them three at a time.

  “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to cheat?” he called down to me when he reached the top first.

  But I beat him into the room anyway because he was out of b
reath and had to lean against the wall. I stuck my finger in his belly as I ran past him and into the Room of Magazines. There were so many of them and so little space to maneuver that it took us nearly an hour to find the four issues of July, 1992. And by the time we found them, we were both dirty and sweaty. I wanted to sit down on the stacks and go through the magazines instantly, but Ford had to have liquid, so we went downstairs, where I got us lemonade before we went outside where it was cooler. However, this time I suggested we sit on the round porch outside my second-floor bedroom, and Ford agreed readily. We didn’t want any more missiles lobbed at us from above.

  We split the magazines and I was the one to find the article. After I’d scanned it, I handed the issue to Ford as I didn’t trust my voice to read it aloud.

  The small article had been written as though it were a joke. “A Ghostly Cry for Vengeance?” the title read. It seems that in July, 1992, a group of young people had been hiking through the mountains near the small town of Cole Creek, North Carolina. They’d made their camp near the site of a fallen-down cabin and had used the chimney to make their fire.

  But during the night one of the campers, a young woman, had started screaming. She said she’d heard moaning, “a sad, deep moaning of a woman in great pain” coming from the old stone foundation of the cabin. No one had been able to quieten her, so when the sun came up, all the campers were tired and short tempered. One young man, in an effort to make his fellow camper stop crying, began to toss stones around to show her that nothing was there.

  “And that’s when they discovered a skeleton,” Ford read, glancing up at me. “Her long, dark hair could still be seen, and bits of her clothing remained.”

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and buried my face. It looked as though my devil story—the crushing part of it anyway—was probably true.

  And I had an idea that I was here in Cole Creek as a young child and since my recall was so vivid, I’d probably seen it happen. That’s why my father got so angry when he found out my mother had told—or, I guess, reminded—me of the story.

  “You okay?” Ford asked.

  I didn’t lift my face when I shook my head no.

  Ford didn’t ask any more questions. He went on to read the rest of the article that said the police had been called and the skeleton taken away to a lab, where later testing revealed that the woman had probably died in 1979.

  “‘So who was she?’” Ford read. “‘A hiker who took refuge in an old house during a storm only to have a wall collapse on her? Or was it more sinister and she was murdered? Whatever caused the woman’s death, according to the camper who “heard” her moans, the woman didn’t die instantly, but lived long enough to cry from the pain’.”

  When Ford put down the magazine, I could feel him watching me. “Long, dark hair,” he said after a while. “The woman on the bridge.”

  I lifted my head and looked at him. I’d forgotten I’d told him about that—and I wished I hadn’t. Right now what I wanted to do was crawl onto my father’s lap and have him comfort me. But my father wasn’t there.

  “Listen to me,” Ford said softly. “I’m beginning not to like this. Things are happening in this town that I don’t like. I think you should leave.”

  I agreed with him. In fact I decided to get up, pack my clothes, and leave Cole Creek right that instant.

  But I didn’t move. Instead, I sat there with my knees drawn up and stared at the porch floor. I didn’t say the words but we both knew that I didn’t want to leave. I liked it there. And, besides, all we knew for sure was that I remembered things. And I’d had a vision of the future. The rest was speculation.

  After a while, he gave a great, melodramatic sigh. “Okay,” he said, “tell me everything you’ve told everyone about your connection to this town.”

  Scenes raced through my head like a video on rewind. I went over everything and everyone. “You,” I whispered. “Everyone wants to know about you. No one asks much about me.”

  “Allie,” he said. “What have you told her?”

  “That I’m your assistant and you’re working on ghost stories.”

  “Devil or ghost?” he asked.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You called the librarian, asked about the devil and she hung up on you, remember? I wasn’t about to have the same thing happen to me.”

  Ford stared out over the porch rail for a few moments. I didn’t interrupt him because it seemed as though he was in a trance. When he looked like that, I would have thought he was in the preliminary stage of a petit mal, but I’d learned that he was “thinking.”

  After a while, he looked back at me.

  “The kids made something up,” he said, his mouth a grimace. “I was so P. O.’d that I was stuck with the mayor and Miss Essie Lee that I didn’t hear all of it. The mayor said the kids had—” Pausing, his eyes widened. “The kids had made up a story to explain what they’d found. That’s what the mayor said.”

  He was looking at me in triumph for having remembered this, but I still couldn’t move. “So you think the townspeople are saying that a woman, some tourist maybe, was accidently killed, and, later, the local kids made up a devil story around the accident?”

  “I think so,” Ford said. “That would explain why the story is in no books about local legends. Maybe no one could verify it.”

  He was obviously trying to calm me down. Or maybe he was trying to make himself believe that there’d never been a murder. “That makes sense,” I said and saw him smile a bit. What an ego he had! He thought he could say something totally stupid and I’d believe him. “I’m sure no one has ever written a word that isn’t true. And I’m sure that if some writer heard a whopping good tale about the townspeople getting together and crushing some woman because they believed she loved the devil, that the writer would never tell such a story unless he could ‘verify’ it.”

  Ford gave a little one-sided smile. “Okay, you win. We writers do tend to stretch the truth. Whatever, I do think this town is keeping one very big secret. And I think Miss Essie Lee has been trying to distract me with the Edward and Harriet story.”

  “But who cares about love when there’s horror, right? Is the best-selling writer in the world a romance writer? Or does he write about horror?”

  After a few moments of silence, Ford spoke. “So what do we do now?” he asked softly. “I thought this was a hundred-year-old devil story, but I think it may be a twenty-some-year-old murder story that several people in this town know about. In fact, I’m beginning to think that someone—or more than one—may have killed a woman and the murder was hushed up.”

  “And the murderers went unpunished,” I said, holding on to my legs tighter.

  “Which means that he, she, or they are probably walking around free—and would probably kill again to keep from being found out.”

  I took a deep breath at that. I’d slipped out of my shoes so I concentrated on my bare toes. Anything rather than think seriously about what he was saying.

  “Jackie,” he said softly, making me look up at him. “Before we came here, I searched fairly thoroughly for any mention of this story anywhere, and I found nothing. The only place the full story seems to exist is in your head. When you add the detail you know to the way your father absconded with you…” He motioned toward the old Time magazine on the little wrought-iron table. “I think maybe you were a child in this town and you saw something truly horrible.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. I tried to imagine myself on a bus, and the bus was moving. Moving to where? I wondered. All I’d ever had in my life was my father. After he died I’d stayed in the town where I’d lived with him. I’d even said yes when a man I didn’t really love asked me to marry him. I’d said yes to roots and to belonging somewhere.

  But now here I was in this house that I knew so very well, with this man I had grown to like, and I was going to have to leave and go somewhere “else,” a place where I knew no one.

  “You think I saw that woman kille
d?” I asked.

  “I’d say there’s a good chance that that’s what happened,” he said as he took both my hands in his, and his touch was comforting. “It seems to me that you have a couple of choices now. You could stay here and maybe find out the truth of something awful that happened to you, or—”

  “Or I could run as fast and as far as I can and get away from here,” I said, trying to smile. “If I did see some woman…crushed to death, I don’t think I want to remember it. I think God made me forget because I’m supposed to forget.”

  “I think that’s a wise decision,” he said softly, leaning back in his chair.

  After that we sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the approaching night. All that went through my head was, Last night. Last night. This was my last night here with this funny, generous man in this beautiful old house.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ford

  Okay, so I was curious. Occupational hazard. Murder wasn’t something I knew much about. Manslaughter, yes. I’d had a cousin or two who’d gone berserk with a shotgun, but there’d been lots of booze and lots of passion involved.

  I couldn’t imagine what would make someone—or a group of people—pile rocks on a woman until she was dead. If it had happened in the 1700s I could almost understand. I once saw a special on TV about the Salem witch debacle and scientists now believe the grain in that year had a kind of mold on it that was, basically, LSD. The theory proposed was that those little girls who accused people of witchcraft were on a major hallucinogenic trip.

  That explained the past, but what about something that happened in the seventies? If the woman’s death had been an accident, why wasn’t it reported? Or maybe the woman had been alone when a wall had fallen on her. But if that was the case, how did Jackie know so much about it? But Jackie said she didn’t know what was truth and what she’d added.

  As always, the why of it plagued me.