by Joy Fielding
She’d always hated uniforms.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Peter had called as the doorbell rang. He was in the den, watching some sporting event on TV. “Marcy,” he’d called again. “Aren’t you going to get that? Marcy?” he’d repeated as the doorbell rang a second, then a third time. “Where are you? Why aren’t you answering the door?”
“It’s the police,” Marcy managed to croak out, although her feet had turned to lead and she lacked the strength to move them. She was suddenly fifteen years old again, standing beside her sister in the principal’s office.
“The police?” Peter marched into the foyer and pulled open the front door. “Officers?” he asked, the word suspended ominously in the air as he ushered the two men inside.
“Are you Dr. Peter Taggart?”
“I am.”
“We understand you have a cottage on Georgian Bay,” one of the officers said as Marcy felt her body go numb. She looked away, not wanting to see their faces. If she didn’t see their faces, she reasoned irrationally, she wouldn’t have to hear what they’d come to say.
“Yes. That’s right,” Peter answered. “Our daughter is up there for the weekend with some friends. Why? Has something happened? Did she set off the alarm again?”
“Your daughter is Devon Taggart?”
“Yes, that’s right. Is she in some sort of trouble?”
“I’m afraid there’s been an accident,” the policeman said. “Perhaps you’d like to sit down.”
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me what’s happened.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Marcy saw the police officer nod, then look toward the floor. “Neighbors saw your daughter climb into a canoe at around ten o’clock this morning. The water was pretty rough and they noted she wasn’t wearing a life jacket. When they saw she still hadn’t returned some three hours later, they called the police. I’m afraid they found her overturned canoe in the middle of the bay.”
“And Devon?” Peter asked quietly, his skin turning the color of parchment paper.
“They’re still searching.”
“So you haven’t found her,” Marcy interrupted forcefully, still refusing to look their way.
“Not yet.”
“Well, that’s good. It means she probably swam to shore.”
“I’m afraid there’s little chance of that,” the officer told her, his voice so low it was almost inaudible. “The canoe was miles from anywhere.”
“It could have drifted,” Marcy said stubbornly.
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “I guess that’s possible.”
“Devon’s a very strong swimmer.”
“The water is extremely cold,” the second officer stated. “It’s doubtful—”
“You said she went to the cottage with friends?” the first officer interrupted to ask Peter.
“Yes,” Peter said. “Carrie and Michelle. I can’t remember their last names,” he added helplessly, looking to Marcy.
Because you never knew them, Marcy thought angrily. When did you ever take the time to learn the last names of any of your daughter’s friends? You were always so damn busy with work or golf. Although that never seemed to matter to Devon. “Stafford and Harvey,” Marcy informed the officers. “I’m sure they’ll be able to tell you where Devon is.”
“According to your neighbors, your daughter was at the cottage alone.”
“That’s not possible. She told us she was going up there with Carrie and Michelle. Why would she lie?”
Why did she usually lie? Marcy thought now, brushing aside a tear.
“Are you all right?” Vic asked immediately, as if he’d been watching her every move.
Marcy didn’t answer. She burrowed down in her seat and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep.
“Do you know if your daughter has been depressed lately?” she heard one of the policemen ask.
“You’re saying you don’t think this was an accident?” Peter said, avoiding the officer’s question. Marcy had to grab her hands to keep from slapping him, twist her fingers to keep from scratching out his eyes. How dare he even entertain such a suggestion, let alone say it out loud?
“I have to ask: Do you think it’s possible your daughter took her own life?”
“No, it’s not possible,” Marcy said adamantly, fleeing the room and racing down the hall before Peter could contradict her. She flung open the door to Devon’s bedroom, swallowing the room in a single glance.
The note was propped up against Devon’s pillow.
“Despite our not being able to visit Blarney Castle,” the guide was saying now, “I hope you have enjoyed our little tour today.” Marcy opened her eyes to see that they had arrived at Dublin’s city limits. “As you no doubt observed from our brief visit, you really need more than one day to fully appreciate Cork. The library is well worth a visit, as is Cork’s Butter Museum and the Crawford Art Gallery. And don’t forget the wonderful university, whose campus is home to more than seventeen thousand students from all over the world.”
Over seventeen thousand students from all over the world, Marcy repeated silently, thinking how easy it would be for someone like Devon to blend in. To disappear.
“Have you ever just wanted to disappear?” Devon had asked Marcy one day not long before her overturned canoe was found in the frigid waters of Georgian Bay. “Just go somewhere and start all over again as someone else?”
“Please don’t talk that way, sweetheart,” Marcy had said. “You have everything.”
What a stupid thing to say, she thought now. She, of all people, should have known that having everything guaranteed nothing.
They’d never recovered Devon’s body.
“That was you I saw,” Marcy whispered under her breath.
“Sorry, did you say something?” Vic asked.
Marcy shook her head. “No,” she said out loud. But inside a voice was screaming, “You aren’t dead, are you, Devon? You’re here. I know you are. And whatever it takes, however long it takes, I’m going to find you.”
THREE
THE MESSAGE LIGHT ON her phone was flashing ominously when Marcy returned to her hotel.
It must be a mistake, she thought, letting her stained and still-damp coat fall to the thick oatmeal-colored carpet and kicking off her shoes, normally reliable black flats that had lost all credibility sometime around two o’clock that afternoon. She balanced on the side of her king-size bed, watching the phone’s red light flash on and off, wondering who could have called. Nobody knew she was here.
Probably the tour bus company, she decided. They’re holding me responsible for the missed excursion to Blarney Castle and expecting me to cover whatever extra cost they incurred as a result. Fine, it’s the least I can do, she thought, deciding not to listen to the message until later. She leaned back against the stack of fancy lace pillows at the head of the bed and lifted her feet to rest on the down-filled comforter, sleep already tugging at her eyelids. She hadn’t realized how utterly exhausted she was. She closed her eyes. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing.
Marcy’s eyes popped open, her head swiveling toward the sound, a new thought piercing her brain, like an ice pick to the back of her skull.
Could it be Devon? she was thinking as she stared at the ringing black telephone. Was it possible she’d been aware of her mother’s presence all along, that she’d spied Marcy through the pub’s window at the precise moment Marcy had spotted her? Had she watched her mother’s frantic search from a safe distance, and had she been thinking of coming forward when Vic Sorvino suddenly appeared? Had she followed them to the bus terminal, watched them board the bus back to Dublin, then started calling every first-class hotel in the city in a desperate effort to track her mother down? Was it possible?
Slowly, carefully, her heart careening wildly between her chest and her throat, Marcy removed the receiver from its carriage and lifted it to her ear.
“Marcy? Marcy, are you there?” Peter’s voice filled th
e large, elegant room. “Marcy? I can hear you breathing. Answer me.”
Tears of disappointment filled Marcy’s eyes. “Hello, Peter,” she said. It was all she could think of to say to the man with whom she’d shared the last twenty-five years of her life. “How are you?”
“How am I?” he asked incredulously. “I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about. I’ve called half a dozen times, left messages.…”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Your sister called,” he told her. “She’s frantic, says you’ve gone off to Ireland by yourself, that you think you’ve seen—” He broke off, took a second to regroup. “I remembered the name of the hotel in Dublin where we …”
“Were supposed to stay together?” Marcy finished for him.
A second’s silence, then, slowly, cautiously, almost lovingly, “You have to come home, Marcy. You have to come home now.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“I saw her, Peter. I saw Devon.”
He sighed. “This is crazy talk, Marcy. You know that.”
“I know what I saw.”
“You only think you saw Devon,” Peter told her gently, the hint of impatience in his voice tempered by his obvious concern. Marcy could almost feel him shaking his head.
Poor Peter, she thought. After all these years, he still had no idea what to make of her. “I did see her.”
“You saw a girl who looked like her.…”
“No.”
“A pretty girl with long dark hair and high cheekbones, who maybe walked the way Devon walked and held her cigarette the same way.…”
“I saw Devon.”
“Just like you saw her all those other times you were so convinced?”
“This time is different.”
“This time is exactly the same,” Peter insisted. “Marcy, please. I thought we got past this.”
“No, you got past it.”
“Because I had to. Because there was no other choice. Our daughter is dead, Marcy.”
“They never found her body.”
Another silence. Another sigh. “So, you’re saying … what? That she faked her own death …?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it was an accident and she saw an opportunity …”
“An opportunity for what, for God’s sake? Why would she do something like this? Why would she let us think she was dead?”
“You know why!” Marcy shouted, silencing him. She imagined Peter hanging his head, closing his eyes.
“How did she get there?” he asked quietly.
“What?”
“She didn’t have a passport. She didn’t have any money.…”
Marcy brushed aside these new questions with an impatient wave of her hand. “She could have had money put away. She could have arranged for a passport. She had friends, Peter, friends we knew nothing about.…”
“Think about what you’re saying, Marcy.”
“I don’t have to think about it,” Marcy insisted, refusing to be swayed. “Our daughter is alive, Peter. She’s here in Ireland.”
“And you just happened to run into her.”
“She walked right by the pub where I was sitting.”
“You were drinking?” he asked, almost hopefully.
“I was drinking tea.”
“And Devon walked by,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Dublin has, what … a population of a million and a half?”
“I know. It’s quite a coincidence,” Marcy said before Peter had the chance, deciding not to tell him the sighting had taken place in Cork.
Another moment’s silence, then, “Did you talk to her?”
“What?”
“Did she see you? Did you talk to her?”
“No. I tried following her but I lost her in the crowd.” Again she felt him shaking his head. “Just because she didn’t see me doesn’t mean I didn’t see her.”
He sighed. The sigh said he’d given it his best shot. There was nothing more to talk about. “Come home, Marcy. Your sister is half out of her mind.…”
“Good-bye, Peter. Please tell Judith not to worry.”
“Marcy—”
She hung up the phone before he could say anything else.
The phone rang again almost immediately. This time Marcy let it go directly to voice mail. If it wasn’t Peter, it was Judith, and she didn’t have the strength to have the same conversation a second time. If they wanted to think she was crazy, so be it. They were probably right.
But that didn’t mean she was wrong about Devon.
She’d leave for Cork first thing the next morning, she decided, a renewed burst of energy pushing her to her feet. She retrieved her suitcase from the closet, placing it on the cream-colored ottoman at the foot of the bed. Within minutes, it was packed, shoes and nightgowns at the bottom, shirts and dresses laid neatly over the top, followed by a few T-shirts and her favorite jeans, along with a nice pair of black pants and a couple of sweaters, her underwear stuffed into every available crevice and corner. The travel agent had advised layers. You never knew what the weather in Ireland would be like. Even mid-July could sometimes feel more like the middle of October, she’d warned Marcy. And make sure to pack an umbrella.
Yeah, sure, Marcy thought, picking her dirt-stained coat off the floor and hanging it over the back of the mahogany chair that sat in front of the sleek, modern desk. The travel agent had highly recommended the five-star luxury hotel, perfectly situated on the cusp of the historic old city and the somewhat bohemian district of Temple Bar. Her room was spacious and sophisticated and warm. Probably she didn’t need the rather grand king-size bed, but what the hell? At least she had plenty of room to thrash around without worrying about someone poking her in the ribs, telling her to be still.
She walked to the large window that overlooked College Green, across from Trinity College. The street was filling up with people, all of whom seemed to know exactly where they were going and what they were doing. She glanced at the clock beside her bed. It was almost eight o’clock. She hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch. She thought she should probably call room service, ask them to send something up. Or maybe she should go out, let the night breeze blow Peter’s doubts out of her head.
Except that Peter didn’t have any doubts. He never had. Wasn’t that one of the things that had drawn her to him in the first place? That he’d always been so sure of himself, so certain of everything? Hadn’t that been exactly what she was looking for?
He was right about one thing: It would have been too much of a coincidence for her to have spotted Devon here. If their daughter had settled in Dublin, and not in Cork, the odds were that Marcy never would have found her. Dublin was an amazingly young city. An astounding half its inhabitants were under the age of thirty, she remembered reading as she watched a young woman fly toward her boyfriend’s extended arms on the street below. The kiss that followed was long and deep. After about thirty seconds, they broke apart, the girl laughing giddily, the boy gazing dreamily up toward her hotel room. Immediately Marcy backed away from the window, although she was on the third floor and it was highly doubtful he could have seen her.
Had Peter ever kissed her with such passion? she wondered. Had she ever responded with such unbridled joy?
Marcy crossed back to the closet and opened the safe deposit box, her hand brushing against the pair of gold hoop earrings Judith had given her for her fiftieth birthday as she reached for the midsize envelope at the very back of the black-velvet-lined box.
Returning to the bed, Marcy opened the envelope and removed the half-dozen photographs, careful to avoid the smaller second envelope inside it, the single word “MOMMY” scrawled across its front. She laid the pictures across the white comforter, studied each one carefully: Devon as a round little baby in her mother’s arms, one happy face mimicking the other, both with the same huge brown eyes, the same cupid’s-bow mouth; Devon as a child of five, wearing a fluffy pink tutu, balancing on chubby litt
le legs and smiling proudly toward the ballet slippers on her feet; Devon on her twelfth birthday, meticulously straightened bangs completely covering her forehead and falling into her eyes, her mouth stretched wide open to show off her newly installed porcelain braces; Devon and Marcy celebrating Devon’s sweet sixteen, arms circling each other’s waists as they leaned over the flower-covered cake to blow out the candles; Devon at eighteen, hovering on the edge of beauty, staring straight at the camera, straggly dark curls falling past her shoulders, her smile timid, unsure. Marcy noted the sadness that was already creeping into the corners of her daughter’s eyes, although there was still a hint of defiance in the set of her chin, as if she were daring the photographer to get too close; and finally, Devon, only weeks before her overturned canoe was found floating in the middle of the bay, wearing an old blue sweater and smoking her now omnipresent cigarette, her once expressive dark eyes blank and rimmed with red, her cupid’s-bow lips now a thin, flat line, carrying not even the pretense of a smile.
Marcy sat staring at the pictures, wondering at Devon’s transformation from giddy toddler to morose young woman. My fault, she thought. Everything, my fault.
There was yet another photograph inside the envelope and Marcy pulled it out. It was a black-and-white picture of her mother, taken around the time she’d turned twenty-one. She was standing in front of a large mirror, her regal profile reflected in the glass at her back. Her eyes were downcast and her long brown hair was pulled off her forehead and away from her face. She was wearing a dress of pale organza, a dark velvet bow at her breast. Her left hand held a gardenia that she pressed coyly to her chin.
Only the slightest hint of madness in her eyes.
The person who’d taken that picture had been desperately in love with her, as her mother had been fond of recounting. Theirs had been an exciting, wild affair, full of fights and reconciliations, of tantrums and ultimatums and declarations of undying devotion, a whirlwind of constantly shifting emotions. And yet, in the end, her mother had opted for safety and security over whirlwinds and excitement. She’d married George Fraser, a man whose name said it all. He was uncomplicated, straightforward, and too sane for his own good.