The Invitation

by Jude Deveraux

  Great, Jackie thought, where there had been no suspicion, now there was. “I have to go,” she had mumbled to Rey before practically running out the door.

  So now, after three days of William’s calm, of William’s organization, of William’s eyes, which sometimes made Jackie shiver, she knew that she had to get rid of him. But how? Insults didn’t seem to affect him—they never had. When he was a kid, Jackie had said lots of rude things to him to try to get him to go away, but nothing had worked. And oddly enough, she had begun to enjoy his silent company. He was so rock solid, something dependable in her life that seemed to have no stability.

  So, now, how did she make him go away? Make him go away before the whole town started talking about the two of them?

  Chapter Six

  Would you like to go flying with me, Billy?” Jackie asked in her sweetest voice. “I’d like to see what you can do with a plane.” The smile she gave him made honey look poisonous. It had taken some thought, but she had remembered William’s caution, his great love of safety. As a child, the only time she’d ever been able to get rid of him was one day when she’d pulled him onto a log stretched high across a cold, rock-filled, rushing stream. He’d walked the log, but later he’d said, “I don’t like you anymore,” and Jackie hadn’t seen him for over a week. Of course she wouldn’t admit it back then, but she’d found herself missing him. In the end, she’d “stopped by” his house for a visit. His mother had pointed Billy out and Jackie had found herself walking toward him. They didn’t say anything—nothing so ridiculous as apologies—but when she left, William was tagging along behind her, and it was four whole days before Jackie had told him he was a nuisance.

  Today, she thought, this airplane was going to be another log across a stream. Only this time she wouldn’t go after him and bring him back.

  One of the Wacos William had purchased was equipped with pilot and student gear so the plane could be flown from both seats. William was in front, Jackie in the back. Pete, her mechanic, gave the propeller a turn, and Jackie gave a thumbs-up sign to William as he started down the runway.

  Again she smiled at him. He looked so sweet, so innocent, sitting there, and his every gesture told her that he wanted to impress her with his flying skills. William was so methodical that she wondered if he’d taken lessons just because his heroine, Jackie, knew how to fly.

  But Jackie knew that flying, like anything else in life, was a talent and talent could not be taught. You could teach a skill and a person could learn to fly by the book, but there were some who had the talent and some who didn’t.

  A few years ago a manufacturer had produced a beautiful little single-wing plane. He thought it was going to revolutionize aviation, and with great hope, he sent the first test pilot up. The plane performed better than anyone had expected, but a few hours later the pilot, for no apparent reason, crashed into a mountain.

  The designer tried to tell people that the crash was the result of pilot error, but pilots, a superstitious lot, said the plane was jinxed. Another prototype rolled off the line and a second pilot took it up. Exactly the same thing happened. After the second crash, no one in the flying world could get near the plane without crossing himself or laughing, or both.

  Desperate, the designer went to Jackie and offered her a large sum of money to take his plane up. Jackie felt that if your time came, it didn’t matter if you were on the ground or in the air and she would much rather be in the air, so she accepted the man’s offer. Many people asked her not to go, but she didn’t listen to them.

  In the air, the little plane was a dream. It handled beautifully, the stick so easy that she felt she could almost go to sleep while flying, and she wanted to stay up forever. Unexpectedly, the first tank ran out of gas about thirty minutes before it should have. The engine sputtered and died in the air. Without much concern, Jackie flipped the switch to the second tank and restarted the engine. Nothing happened. Either the second tank was empty or there was a blockage in the line and the gas couldn’t get to the engine.

  “This is it,” Jackie said to herself and for a moment she wondered how she could tell the people on the ground that what had killed the other pilots was a faulty fuel line. Oddly enough, considering she was facing certain death, her head was completely clear as she looked at the switch to the gas tank. On and Off, the little printed label said. Or did it read, Off and On? She flipped it the other way, tried the engine, and it started.

  Laughing, she brought the plane to the ground and had the great pleasure of informing the designer that the only thing wrong with his plane was that someone had labeled the fuel switch wrong. The other pilots had inadvertently switched it off. No one but Jackie had thought of flipping the switch the other way. Talent. Instinct. Whatever. Jackie had lived because she didn’t fly by the book.

  After ten minutes in the plane with William, Jackie knew that he would never have thought to flip the switch the other way. William was an utterly perfect flyer. There was a rule behind every movement he made. He took no chances, was absolutely safe.

  After thirty minutes, Jackie was bored to tears. Couldn’t he understand that flying was creative? Airplanes had nothing to do with books. Airplanes moved through the air. What could be more creative than that? Yet William flew as though there were road signs stuck in the clouds. She fully expected to see him extend his hand and signal a right turn.

  After forty-five minutes, she could stand no more. Motioning to him that she wanted to take over, she took the controls.

  There were two ways to fly: with passengers and without. Usually Jackie tried to behave herself when she had a passenger, but now she wanted to make William say that he didn’t want to be partners with her and maybe, too, she wanted to show off a bit.

  First off: clean out the cockpit. Daredevil pilots loved to brag that they had very clean cockpits. All they had to do was turn the plane upside down and give a little wiggle to the wings. Simple. Of course you had to make sure the seat belt was fastened. It had happened that people had fallen out.

  Jackie turned the plane upside down and wiggled, then did it again. Quickly she came out of the position to move forward and swoop upside down again. She didn’t want to miss a smidgen of debris. Dust and dirt, a few chewing gum wrappers, flew past her face. In front of her, William’s strong hands were gripping the sides of the cockpit as he held himself in.

  Jackie had made a good living and a name for herself with barnstorming and thrilling crowds. The more chances she took, the more she got paid—and she was paid very well.

  Twists came next. She flipped wing over wing over wing. Quickly she went into a loop, turning in a complete vertical circle. This was followed by her own special creation that someone had called a dippy twist loop, in which she did a twist and a loop at the same time.

  When she came out of the dippy, she went into a stall and the world suddenly seemed unnaturally silent until she started the engine again.

  Years before, when she was learning to fly, Charley had made sure that she knew how to handle herself in every emergency. He’d made her take off from beaches, roadways, ball parks, racetracks. She’d had to fly right-side up, upside down, in crosswinds, tailwinds, no wind. He’d taught her how to handle a fire on board and ice on the wings. When there was thick fog between her and the ground, he’d shown her how to orient herself by burning a hole in the fog with her engine heat. He’d taught her how to land on water and what to do if she was swept out to sea.

  She decided to show William nearly everything she’d learned. She raced around tall trees, calculating the distance between them by inches. One miscalculation and the wings would have been torn off. The moment she was through the trees, she did a couple of snap rolls. Nailing the nose to the horizon, she did several three hundred and sixty degree lateral turns, one after another, coming out about a quarter of an inch before she would have flown smack into a mountain.

  About a week after she ran off with Charley, during which time he’d rarely let her out of a pl
ane, he’d said, “Kid, you got a gyroscope in your head. If you’re upside down and backwards it’s all the same to you. You know where you’re going.” Now Jackie flew upside down for a while, maneuvering through the trees with her head pointed toward the ground.

  She knew she was getting low on gas so she headed back to Eternity, writing her name in the sky as she went. Skywriting lost something with no flares attached to the tail of the plane, but the motion was the same.

  As she hit the hard-packed runway in Eternity, the engine died from lack of gas. Perfect, she thought. She had calculated perfectly. Charley would have been proud of her.

  After Jackie landed the plane, William stayed in his seat, not moving, his head back, his eyes closed, and she could see that he was fighting hard not to be ill. There weren’t many people who could go through what William had just experienced and not lose a meal. But somehow he was managing to control his stomach.

  Standing up, Jackie reached her hand out to him, and briefly—very briefly—he opened his eyes to glance at her, then gave a faint shake of his head. He was not going to accept her offer of a steadying hand when he disembarked.

  On the ground, Jackie politely looked away as he somehow climbed down from the plane without anyone’s help. When she turned to look at him his face was white, his skin clammy-looking, and he wasn’t too steady on his feet.

  “All right, Jackie,” he said solemnly, as he took a deep breath, working hard to control his nausea. “You win. I’ll pack my bags and leave. I’ll be out of here in a matter of hours.”

  Now that she’d done what she planned, she couldn’t help feeling bad. She didn’t want to discontinue their friendship; she just wanted him out of her house and out of her life on a daily basis. “William, I…”

  When he turned to look at her, his eyes blazed, and his white skin was tinged with the deep glow of anger. No, there was more in his eyes than anger; there was rage. Old-fashioned life-endangering rage.

  When he spoke, his voice was very soft and very quiet. “So now I guess you’ll tell me you want to be friends. That you’ve always had a high regard for me and you’ll always treasure my friendship.” He took a step toward her, looming over her. “I don’t want your friendship, Jackie. I never wanted your friendship. Since I was a little boy I’ve wanted your love.”

  At that statement she made the mistake of giving the slightest smile, and that smile seemed to make something in William break. Even as a child he had been mild-mannered and sweet-tempered, but now he seemed to turn into something fierce, something dangerous. When he took a step toward her, she stepped back.

  “Does my wanting your love amuse you? Is it something to make you laugh? Stupid little Billy Montgomery following tall, eccentric Jackie O’Neill around. Oh, yes, you’ve always been eccentric. Even as a child you were different from everyone else. The other kids were trying their best to be carbon copies of each other, but not you. Oh, I know you thought that what you wanted was to wear the latest fashions and be part of the group, but the truth was, you loved climbing on your mother’s roof and hammering the tiles in place. You loved having an excuse to get away from the other kids in your class so you could do exactly what you wanted to do. When you were sixteen and no girl would be caught dead climbing trees and swinging on ropes, you were doing those things. You have always done what you wanted and the rest of the world be damned.”

  He wasn’t presenting a very pretty picture of her. He made her sound odd and selfish. She opened her mouth to speak, but he leaned over her until her back was bent.

  “And I loved you for having the courage to be who you were. You didn’t try to conform. In this town where everyone knows everyone else, you found a way, an excuse, to be who you wanted to be. You found a way to do what you wanted to do. And when an opportunity came for you to get out of here, you didn’t hesitate, you took that opening. No fear, no second thoughts, not even a backward glance. You saw what you wanted and you went after it.

  “I loved that in you, Jackie. I may have been a little boy, but I saw quite clearly what you were and what you were going to do, and I loved you for it. I’m a man now and I know that what I felt then wasn’t puppy love. I don’t have any way to explain it. I loved you as a man then, and that’s the way I love you now.”

  “Now?” she whispered, looking into his eyes. It certainly was difficult to think of him as a child at this moment.

  “Yes, now! Maybe we’re alike but in opposite ways. Since the first time I saw you I have loved you. I was just five years old when my mother opened the door to you. You stood there, fifteen years old, too tall, too thin, your hair hanging in your eyes because you’d been in too much of a hurry to tie it back. You were pretty in an obscure way, but you weren’t going to make any man’s heart stop beating. You very nearly made mine stop, though. I looked up at you and I fell in love with you, and I’ve never stopped loving you since.”

  He seemed to grow taller as he leaned over her even farther. “I was the one who got my father to establish the Taggie, hoping to entice you back to Chandler. I was the one who had my father write to you after Charley died and ask you to start a flying service for our family. I anonymously sponsored six air shows for you and Charley at times when I knew that Charley had drunk your funds away. It was my uncle who pointed out to the president your good deed in saving the burn victims.”

  She was blinking at him. “You?” was all that she could whisper.

  “Yes, me. I have loved you always. Always. Without hesitation. Just as you took one look at an airplane and knew that flying was what you were supposed to do in life, I took one look at you and knew that you and I were meant to be together. I’ve dated very few women. I’ve never been to bed with a woman because I felt I would have been betraying you. I waited for you, and while I was waiting, I took care of you to the best of my ability.”

  Suddenly he straightened and glared at her. “And now this. You.”

  The way he said “you” made her skin crawl.

  “I misjudged you. I thought you had a spine. I thought you had the courage of your convictions. You could run away with a man twice your age and thumb your nose at an entire town. You learned to fly an airplane better than any man alive, and you can laugh at the idea that a man is equal to you. You swung on tree branches when other girls were afraid to get their hair wet. You can do whatever you want in life. You live life exactly how you want, without thought for what the rest of the world thinks, but when it comes to loving, you’re a coward. You’re ready to throw me away merely because our drivers’ licenses say we’re different ages.”

  She started to defend herself, but he wouldn’t allow it.

  “Don’t you dare try to lie to me or to yourself. The only thing standing between us is your ridiculous notion that we shouldn’t be together because of our ages. You won’t let yourself get to know me. You’re afraid to have a conversation with me for fear you might find out that I have a head—a man’s head—on my shoulders. I’m no more a boy than you are an adult. I was born an old man, and you, Jackie, were born a child, and you’ll always be a child. You will never grow up, or at least you’ll never grow old. Do you know one of the reasons I love you so much?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Because you keep me young. No matter how old you get, you will always have the freshness of a child. You have no idea how other people’s minds work. We who are ordinary think about mortgages and our aching backs, but you don’t. You never have and you never will. You think in terms of doing whatever you want at any time you want. If you want to fly an airplane, you do so. Never mind that other people tell you not to. I was eaten with jealousy of Charley. He knew exactly what you were and he had sense enough to reach out and grab you. You were grateful to him, but he knew that he should have been on his knees kissing the ground in thanks that he’d had the privilege of meeting you. He knew that you’d take care of him and make him laugh while you were doing it. He knew your value very well.”

  William gave a
little snort. “Before you left, Charley ruffled my hair and said, ‘Better luck next time, kid.’ You were a prize for him then, and you’re a prize now.”

  William’s handsome face distorted into the barest of sneers, and the way he looked her up and down made her feel ashamed of herself. “At least you were a prize. I never thought it would happen, but you got old, Jackie. You became an old woman.”

  He stood in front of her for a moment as though waiting for something. Maybe he expected her to throw her arms around him and tell him that she hadn’t grown old, and her proof was that she was willing to live with a man ten years younger than she was. But she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t do it. No matter what he said, when she looked at him, she saw little Billy Montgomery, and until she got that image out of her head she’d never be able to think of him as anything except a child.

  After a long moment of silence, at last he said, “All right, Jackie, you win. Or do we both lose?” He gave a sigh that came from deep within him. “I’ll pack and be out of here immediately.”

  She didn’t move as he walked away. Part of her was sad, but a big part of her was relieved. Now she’d have no more indecision, no more agony. No more watching his strong young body move about the house; no more lying awake to listen for the sound of him.

  As she turned away from the house, she wanted to walk, walk for hours and miles. She didn’t want to see him leave; she wanted to put off entering the empty house for as long as possible.

  She wasn’t crying, so she should have been able to see where she was going, but for some reason she wasn’t looking. Maybe her mind was too preoccupied, but whatever the reason, she didn’t realize that there was no ground in front of her, just a steep drop down into a rocky arroyo filled with rusting debris from generations of litterers. Usually agile, she tried to catch herself, but her foot landed on loose rock and she went tumbling.

  She didn’t fall very far, but she landed in the middle of a rusty heap of metal that had once been a Ford. Dazed for a moment, she shook her head, mentally feeling if she’d broken any bones. She hadn’t. Everything was all right, and she couldn’t help smiling in relief. Still smiling, she wiped her hand across her forehead and felt the hot, thick, dampness that could only be blood. Pulling her hand away, she saw that it was covered with blood and there was more flowing out of what looked to be a deep cut in the palm of her right hand. All around her were sharp edges of rust-covered metal, and she knew that she’d cut herself on one of them. Thoughts of lockjaw immediately went through her head.