Wild Orchids

by Jude Deveraux

  When I saw the name I drew in my breath. Jacquelane Amarisa Cole Landreth. JacqueLANE. As in Harriet Lane, the president’s lovely niece.

  Leaving my office in a rush, I went down the stairs so fast I nearly slid. Jackie’s bedroom door was still closed, so I tiptoed down to the entrance hall. There on the little table by the door was Jackie’s handbag. Every man on earth knows that the ultimate taboo is looking inside a woman’s handbag. It ranked right up there with cannibalism. A woman might have her purse stolen, but everyone knew that only a real sicko would actually go through it.

  I had to take a couple of breaths before I slid the zipper open. As much as Pat and I had shared, I’d never gone through her handbag.

  Considering what I was doing, I used as much courtesy as I could muster and pulled her wallet out with just my thumb and forefinger. I told myself I wasn’t really snooping. I only wanted one thing: her driver’s license.

  It was on top, in the little see-through compartment of her wallet. I held it up to the light and looked. Jackie’s whole name was Jacquelane Violet Maxwell. JacqueLANE. As in Harriet Lane, the woman her father had a crush on. And Violet was, no doubt, for Miss Lane’s violet eyes.

  I sat down hard on the chair by the hall table. Congratulations, Newcombe, I told myself. You just found out what you didn’t want to know. The woman you hired was almost certainly an eyewitness to a murder. And worse, she probably saw her own mother, as well as her grandfather, commit that murder.

  I sat there for a long time, holding Jackie’s driver’s license, glancing at it now and then, and trying to think about what I may have done. My snooping may have put someone’s life in danger. Jackie may have been very young when she saw the murder, but it was obvious that she could remember a lot from the time she was in Cole Creek.

  She remembered every inch of the old house I’d bought. Two days ago I’d found her tapping on a wall in the kitchen. I didn’t bother to ask what she was doing, but stood in the doorway and watched. After a moment, her tap sounded hollow and she said, “Found it!” She often knew where I was, so I wasn’t surprised when she turned and looked at me.

  “I went to put the olive oil on the shelf but the shelf wasn’t there,” she said as she picked up one of the knives I’d bought. It had a serrated blade and the ad said it could cut aluminum cans in half. (It could, too, because Tessa and I had cut through six cans before Jackie made us stop.)

  I watched as Jackie felt along the old wallpaper, then began to cut. After about ten minutes of feeling and cutting, she peeled down a big square of wallpaper to reveal a mouse palace. Insulation (probably illegal asbestos), dirt, globbed-up paper, threads, lint, and hair of what looked to be four shades, were all matted together with many years of mouse pee and millions of little black droppings.

  Behind the nest were boards so greasy they made my uncle Reg’s car repair shop look clean. That’s why the shelves were covered over. If it’d been me, and I’d been given a choice between cleaning those shelves and wallpapering over them, I would have definitely wall-papered.

  “A good place for food storage,” I said.

  Turning to me, Jackie made a wicked face while rubbing her hands together. “Mr. Hoover will now do his work,” she said as she ran to get the vacuum.

  By the time I came down to lunch, the shelves were clean and shiny, and the kitchen smelled like the bleach Jackie had used to clean them.

  I didn’t bother to ask Jackie how she’d known the shelves were there. And she seemed to take her knowledge for granted. As she dished up some kind of shrimp thing and four steamed vegetables, she ranted on and on about what kind of lazy idiot would board up a closet rather than remove a beehive, and who would cover over shelves just because they had about a hundred years of grease on them.

  I put my head closer to my plate.

  So, anyway, I knew that Jackie’s memories of the time she was in Cole Creek, no matter what her age, were clear. I doubt if any court would convict people for murder based on what Jackie remembered, but then I’d never thought that murderers were logical people who would stop to reason out what they were going to do.

  On the other hand, based on what I’d seen on the Internet, everyone who had been involved—or who I thought was probably involved—seemed to have died soon after the woman did.

  I put Jackie’s license back in her wallet and her wallet back in her handbag just where I’d found it, then zipped her bag closed and went back upstairs.

  The search service had found one more name. Miss Essie Lee was the sister of, and the sole surviving relative of, Icie Lee Shaver who had died in yet another “freak” accident. Seems Icie Lee had been walking in the woods and fallen into an old well. She’d been buried to her neck, but the rotten timbers of the old well had held enough that she’d been able to breathe. Eventually, after a day or two, her struggles to free herself had caused the walls to collapse on her.

  “Crushed,” I said aloud. As they had all murdered, so they had died.

  I shut down my computer and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep much. The images from the words that had come up on my computer screen haunted me. The words “as they lived” kept running through my head.

  At three A.M. I gave up trying to sleep, put my hands behind my head, and stared up at the fan on the ceiling. It was going full speed and I stared at the little wooden end of the chain as though it were a hypnotist’s sphere.

  As the first ray of sun came in through my window, I thought that if I wanted to know who had crushed that woman, I should read all the obituaries for the year after her death. Based on what I’d found so far, whoever had died by being crushed had probably participated.

  When I had things sorted out a bit in my mind, I began to relax and finally fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until noon. When I saw the clock, I felt a sense of panic. Where was Jackie? She was so industrious that I could always hear where she was, but the house was absolutely silent.

  I found Jackie sitting at the kitchen table playing with one of the neatest gadgets I’d ever seen in my life. It was a tiny Hewlett-Packard color printer, and beside it was a little camera with a door open on its side.

  I’m ashamed to say that, as I sat down at the table and watched that little machine make a perfect print, I forgot all about who got crushed and why. When I started playing with the two pieces of equipment, Jackie didn’t say a word, just got up from the table and began scrambling eggs.

  The printer was very simple to use, and by the time Jackie put the eggs in front of me, I’d made two 4 x 6 enlargements. One was of roses on a fence, and the other was a photo of a red and white tablecloth, a wine bottle, and half a loaf of bread.

  “This what you did yesterday?” I asked, smiling. A picnic by herself?

  But my question seemed to disturb Jackie because she snatched the little disk out of the printer, stuck it back in the camera, pushed some buttons, then put the camera back on the table. I knew without a doubt that she’d just erased the two photos of the picnic. As for the photos I’d printed, she burned them in the flame on the stove.

  Of course I was dying to ask questions, but I didn’t. Besides, Jackie gave me a look that said that if I asked anything, she’d make me sorry.

  That was okay, I had my own secrets. I never even considered telling Jackie what I’d found out on the Internet. I also wasn’t going to tell her that Harriet Cole’s daughter had the same unique spelling of her name that Jackie did.

  For the next two days, all I can say about Jackie’s behavior is that it was odd. She didn’t act like herself. Not that I’d spent masses of time with her, but after the Sunday I spent with Dessie, Jackie seemed to change. It was as though her mind was elsewhere. She cooked three meals a day for me, and she answered the telephone, and she even told Nate what to do in the garden, but there was something different. For one thing, she was quiet, hardly ever saying a word. And for another, she wasn’t moving around much. Three times I looked out my office window and saw her just standing there, staring int
o space. It was like seeing a hummingbird with its wings still, motionless.

  Of course I asked her what was wrong, but she just looked off into the distance and said, “Mmmm.”

  I tried to get a reaction out of her. I told her Dessie and I’d had a fabulous time together on Sunday. No comment from Jackie. I told her Dessie and I’d had great sex together. “Mmmm,” was all Jackie said as she kept staring into space. I told her I was running away with Dessie to Mexico and we were taking Tessa with us. No comment. I told Jackie I was in love with a green-eyed grizzly bear and she was heavy with my child. Jackie said, “That’s nice,” then wandered outside.

  On Wednesday, she took some snapshots of Nate with that new camera of hers—I didn’t say so but I was a little hurt that she’d bought that and the tiny printer without letting me help choose them. When we saw the photos, Nate looked like something out of a fashion magazine. And that was without a bath.

  When I tried to talk to him about the possibility of a future in the fashion world, he wouldn’t consider it. I understood. What self-respecting male wanted a job being photographed? On the other hand, the money could be very good. I wanted Jackie to talk to him, but she stood at the far end of the garden and wouldn’t get involved.

  On Thursday morning the FedEx package from the man in Charlotte finally arrived. Part of me wanted to open it and part of me wanted to burn it instead.

  I’d had a couple of days to think about the situation now. I’d decided that some very angry people had piled rocks on a woman back in 1979, and that Jackie, as a child, had seen it all. After the murder, I think someone played vigilante and somehow, one by one, killed all the people who had committed the murder.

  If my theory was correct, then Jackie was in no danger. And as far as I could tell, she knew nothing about the later vendetta killings. She knew only about the crushing.

  Jackie also knew the reason her mother, who was probably one of the murderers, gave to justify killing the woman. She’d said that people who loved the devil had to die.

  The devil made me do it, I thought. Isn’t that the reason that’s been given for so many murders over the centuries? “It wasn’t my fault,” I heard people on news programs say. “The devil controlled my mind.” When I first met Jackie she’d told me that the townspeople believed a woman had been in love with the devil.

  I put my hand over my eyes. If Jackie was safe, then we could stay. But if we stayed, I knew myself well enough to know that I’d dig until I found out the truth about why that woman had been killed. What human emotion had driven them to murder? And I deeply wanted to know who had avenged her death.

  With shaking hands, I opened the FedEx package. The top page was a letter of apology. The man had been ill so he was late in sending the material, but he hoped I’d still send the autographed books. That’s one for him, I thought. I hadn’t been ill, I’d just forgotten to send the books.

  The photograph of the remade skeleton was what I wanted to see, and it was at the bottom of the stack. When I pulled it out, I saw the face of a pretty woman, probably late thirties, and I had no doubt she was a relative of Jackie’s. When Jackie was the same age, she was going to look a lot like this woman.

  As I stood there looking at the picture, I tried to figure out who she was—other than the woman on the bridge, that is. She wasn’t Jackie’s mother because I was pretty sure her mom had been crushed by a car.

  I flipped through the papers the man had sent me. “Unknown” was everywhere. She was an unknown woman and it was unknown whether her death was an accident or a murder. The police might have been able to figure it out by the way the stones were on top of her, but by the time the police had arrived, the kids who’d found the body had removed them all. It seems the girl who’d “heard” the crying during the night had been screaming hysterically that they needed to “let the poor woman out,” so all the stones had been taken off the skeleton.

  The police had interviewed the kids and each of them had been positive about the way the stones had been arranged. But half had been positive one way, and the other half were sure of another way. In the end, the evidence had been “inconclusive.”

  I looked at the names of the kids and wondered what I’d find out if I put them through a search service. Even as I was telling myself I shouldn’t do such a thing, I turned toward the stairs to go up to my office.

  But I was stopped when Tessa threw open the front door, and, running full speed, leaped up on me, her legs around my waist, her arms tight around my neck.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, kissing me all over my face.

  I had no idea what she meant but it was nice. She wasn’t old enough to have developed pretenses, so whatever she was feeling came out honestly and openly.

  “What?” I asked, smiling. The whole packet about the murdered woman had been knocked out of my hands and was now spread on the floor under my feet. I wanted to leave it there and hoped it fell through the cracks.

  I pulled Tessa’s arms from around my neck so I could breathe. “Thanks for what?”

  “The gnome.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. When we’d bought the garden statues, we’d spent quite a bit of time debating about gnomes, but I was pretty much against them. When I was in the first grade, Johnnie Foster and I’d had a fight when he’d said I looked like a gnome. I’d never heard the word before so I asked the school librarian and she’d handed me a book. I didn’t like what I saw.

  Truthfully, I was afraid Tessa wanted gnomes in the garden because she liked me.

  I peeled Tessa off my body, stood her on the floor, and began picking up the papers.

  “Who’s that?” she asked, looking down at the photo of the re-created face. As with most kids, Tessa conserved her energy and didn’t help me pick up the papers.

  “Just somebody,” I said, shoving all the papers back into the cardboard envelope. I didn’t want Jackie to see anything inside the packet, so I put it in plain sight on the hall table. I figured that if I hid it inside a book in the library on the top shelf, she’d find it in about three seconds.

  “Okay,” I said to Tessa. “What’s this all about?”

  “You bought the biggest gnome statue in the whole world and put him in the garden. He’s wonderful and I love him. Thank you.”

  For a nanosecond it flashed through my mind that Jackie had got together with Dessie and commissioned a gnome statue. Sure. And a frog was coming next week.

  I put my hand out for Tessa to take and we walked out to the garden together.

  She was right.

  Sitting in the shade on one of the old park benches Nate had repaired was what looked to be a gnome. Standing, it would have been about five foot four, with a big head, a powerful torso and short, strong limbs. The eyes were wide open, but sightless, the mouth slightly open. It had big eyes with thick lashes, a wide nose with a horizontal end, full lips, huge ears flat to the head, and long black and gray hair pulled back into a braid.

  “Ssssh,” Tessa said, pulling me by the hand. “He looks real, doesn’t he?”

  I let her lead me around the bushes to see the rest of the “gnome.” He had on dark green pants, a worn yellow shirt, and a purple vest that was covered with hundreds of little enameled pins of insects. An entomologist’s dream.

  While Tessa went forward to get closer to the creature, I stood back and stared. He wasn’t a statue, but a man. And he was sound asleep. He was sitting upright on a bench, his eyes wide open, but he was asleep.

  Way inside my mind I knew I should be telling Tessa he was real and that she should get away from him, but I couldn’t seem to move. Of course I knew who he was. It was just that I’d never seen him in person before.

  Reaching out, Tessa touched the man’s cheek. He didn’t so much as move an eyelash, but I saw that he instantly went from asleep to awake. A light came into his eyes and he was looking at me.

  “Hello, son,” said my father.

  “Hello, cousin,”
said my cousin Noble as he stepped out of the bushes.

  Both of them were smiling at me.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jackie

  All I wanted was to be with Russell. He made me feel good in a way I’d never felt before.

  All my life I’d been accused of being angry. So many women I’d met had decided to play therapist and tell me that my sarcastic remarks stemmed from a deep anger inside me.

  I could agree with that, but what I didn’t agree with was when they said I should “let it all out.” They weren’t happy when I refused to tell them my deepest secrets. I think they thought I wasn’t playing the girl-game by the girl-rules, which clearly state that everybody has to tell everybody else everything.

  The truth was that I had no reason for my anger. The bad that had happened to me wasn’t all that bad and in fact, I felt guilty for having any anger at all. In one town my dad and I’d lived in for a couple of years while I was in high school, my best friend confessed to me that her father got into bed with her at night and “did it” to her. She swore me to secrecy before she told me, but I didn’t keep my word. I told my dad.

  When the dust settled from the turmoil my father raised, he and I left that town.

  No, I had nothing deep-seated to be angry over. It was just that for most of my childhood I’d felt torn in half. I loved my dad a lot, but I was also angry at him for not telling me about myself. As I’d grown up and seen and read about what went on in the world, I realized that something awful must have happened to make my father take me away in the middle of the night. All I wanted was for him to tell me what it was.

  But whenever I hinted at wanting to know about my mother, or the aunt he’d mentioned, my dad would either mumble something that contradicted what he’d said before or he’d clam up. It used to make me furious! It was especially infuriating because I could talk to him about anything else in the world. As I grew up, we girls would loftily inform each other about the birds and the bees. Then I’d go home and tell my dad every word, and he’d tell me what was true or not. Later, the girls would say, “You asked your dad that?!”