Stymied, she walked. The only piece of luck was that she was wearing good shoes. She walked all the way around to the other side of the lake to where she could see the dock. She sat down and watched the house, realized that she was replaying what had happened eight years before. She’d run away then too. She might as well be sixteen again, outside the house, unable to go back in. It was night then, and she’d slipped out and walked all the way to town alone.
A car started at the house, and she saw Frank pulling away. She was supposed to go to the hospital with him. She’d run out on Frank and accused Mary’s husband of murder. The whole theory about Robert seemed flimsy, fantastic now. She knew the deputy thought so.
While she sat on the ground on the far side of the lake, everyone left except Mary and Alice. Frank would go straight home from the hospital. The others would be gone for at least a couple of hours, then they’d all return for the night. She had to get away.
She headed for the house and stopped short at the edge of the drive when she saw Mary leave by the front door, heading for the cottage. Regina crossed quickly to the front door, hesitated, eased it open, and seeing no one, slipped in. Stomach in knots, breathing hard, she tiptoed upstairs, reached the attic stairs, and eased the door shut, nearly collapsing with relief. Quickly, she packed her bag and collected her work.
She whirled at a knock on the attic door. Footsteps on the stairs. Mary.
“Regina. I—you’re leaving.” She sounded resigned.
“I can’t possibly stay.” Mary started to speak and Regina interrupted her, “I have to get back to Richmond to present my project.”
Mary nodded.
“If he’s better, there’s plenty of time for me to see him. I’ll go tomorrow, first thing after my meeting.”
Silence. Then, “I know how you feel.”
“No, you don’t.”
Mary watched her gather her things. Regina passed her, face averted, afraid she would burst into tears. On the steep attic stairs, as she descended, with Mary just behind her, the door opened and Alice looked up at her.
“Mary? Oh.” Alice clutched her chest and backed up. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! I’m leaving, I’m gone, and I’m never coming back!”
Regina clattered down the last couple of stairs and past Alice, down the main stairs and out, and jumped in her car. Hands shaking, she fumbled interminably to fit the key in the ignition, stalled the car twice before it roared to life. On the way out, her heart stopped at the sight of a car parked in front of the cottage. Robert. The cottage door opened and she spun her wheels and drove blindly for two miles, jouncing down and up at the creek, before pulling over.
She swore to herself, “I am never, never, never going back.”
But where was she going? Back to Richmond? If so, she was driving in the wrong direction. On the Shackley Road. She found herself at Mrs. Marsden’s and had an idea.
“Hello, Regina.” Ellen Marsden got up from a rocking chair in the room beyond the front desk and came to the counter.
Regina tried to force out a normal voice. “Hi. Do you have a room available?”
“Yes, certainly. Is Sophie coming back early?”
“No, it’s for me. Just for tonight. The house is overflowing and I have some work to do. I don’t want to go back to Richmond.” To her chagrin, tears welled in her eyes.
Mrs. Marsden clucked gently. “I’ll put you in the room next to Sophie’s.” Over her shoulder, leading the way, she said, “We only serve breakfast and lunch, but why don’t you join me for Irish stew in a little while? I’ll be sitting down at about six.”
In her room, Regina dumped her suitcase, project materials, and purse and dropped into an overstuffed chair. Turned her head to look out the window. The warm serenity of the valley and the hills seemed more than distant from her turbulent state. The beauty and tranquility of nature were beyond her reach.
She considered calling Al from the room, changed her mind. Then changed it again. What if he called the house? What would they say to him? It was not yet four, so he would still be at work. She called, kept it short, told him she’d be in Richmond the next day and would explain everything later, dodged his questions, and got off the phone as soon as she could. She’d only whetted his curiosity, she knew, but she would deal with that later.
What could she have told him? That she’d run away again? Run out on Frank after accusing Mary’s husband of sexual assault, not to mention murder, in front of the whole family? And the fiasco of the deputy coming to the house. He’d feel bad about that, but it was entirely her fault. He’d only done what she asked, fool that she was.
She got up and hauled out her project. Due tomorrow! How was she supposed to cope with a deadline when her world was crashing down around her ears? She picked up the Haven Acres brochure, which by now she passionately hated, and ripped it in two. In four. Into confetti and watched it flutter into the trash basket in the bathroom. She next looked at the text Ron had given her for the brochure.
You’ve made mistakes, it said.
Oh boy, have I, she thought.
Caught waiting half-dressed in her sister’s husband’s bedroom.
Her cheeks burned, and the memory came to her with crippling force. In Mary’s bedroom, what had always been Mary’s bedroom but was now Mary’s and Robert’s. Thinking she was safe because no one was expected home until much later, she’d put on her prom dress, holding it closed in the back to fit the empire waist, and looked in the full-length mirror on Mary’s closet door. Hadn’t heard the front door. Saw him in the mirror, leering behind her. She gasped, whirled, and refused to relive his grappling at her, tearing at her clothes, at her body underneath.
She shuddered. What if Mary and Bebe had not shown up when they did?
Wild, Robert called her, denying everything. No daughter of mine, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth, Jezebel.
Disgraceful, Bebe called her. Don’t even tell Mama and Papa. They would die of shame.
Mary stood frozen, speechless, agonized, surely understanding what had happened. Regina fled, once again, to the attic of the big house.
Hiding there, trembling, she’d refused to come down until everyone had given up and gone to bed, then she crept down through the big house and ever so carefully into the unlocked back door of the silent cottage. She took the housekeeping money Mary kept in the kitchen table drawer and fled with the clothes on her back. Add to her sins thievery. She alternately ran and walked the route to school, past the school, all the way to the bus station, where she sat the rest of the night, hours, on a bench, wide-eyed and terrified. A lark Ron called it!
And now all these years later, she had run away in disgrace again.
She took her sketch pad to a table in front of a window, where the indirect natural light was good, and drew. Made a few false starts on the runaway project—a girl on a bench, a girl on a bus—then gave it up and lay down for a nap.
Two hours later, feeling calmer and resigned, Regina found Mrs. Marsden in her private sitting and dining room on the first floor. Regina knocked, apologized, and thanked her.
“I’m delighted to have you for company. Sophie would never forgive me if I didn’t take care of you. I know she took you in years ago.” Regina blinked, and Mrs. Marsden smiled. “Sophie and I are old friends. I know a thing or two about your family.”
Caught off-guard, Regina couldn’t think what to say.
“She’s crazy about you though,” Mrs. Marsden added. “She told me all about how you came to her in Savannah when you were in high school. She always said you were pure gold.”
At that, the floodgates opened. Regina was mortified at bursting into tears.
Mrs. Marsden plunked a box of tissues in front of her and poured her a glass of sherry, shushing and patting and saying, “Now, now.”
Collecting herself, Regina asked, “How do you know Sophie?”
“We went to school together at Longwood, in
Farmville. I studied home economics, but Sophie wanted to be a teacher. Most of the girls were like me, looking for a husband, but not Sophie. She was a real serious student.”
Regina breathed out a shaky sigh and felt herself settling down. “Did you know my father back then, when Sophie first met him?”
“Oh, yes. William Hannon was the most eligible bachelor in town. He lived in Petersburg, but he went to Charlottesville for some reason I’ve forgotten now—a party, I think—and that’s how he met Sophie. Sophie lived with her Aunt Emily in Charlottesville. I stayed with Sophie for a month once in the summer. I kept up with Emily Worthington too, until she died. Emily always said it turned out just as well for Sophie in the end. She said she wouldn’t be surprised if William had often regretted his choice.”
“His choice?”
“Marrying Alice Wilcox instead of Sophie. Oh, Alice was a lovely girl, but those Wilcoxes.” She shook her head. “Holier than thou. I know I’m talking about your family, but I’m not sure they’ve done very well by you.”
“You know my brothers and sisters?”
“Not really. I’ve met them. The redheaded one, Elizabeth, butter wouldn’t melt in that girl’s mouth.”
“Bebe! She hates me.”
“Bebe, yes, that’s the one. Ran around with Mrs. Wilson’s girls. She wanted to be the center of attention just like her mother, but she never had her mother’s looks or charm. And I know Mary, of course. She’s the one who stayed home. Took care of all the children, more like a mammy than a daughter. And she married that man.”
Regina breathed out and couldn’t seem to breathe back in. “Robert?” Her voice was barely audible.
“I went to Grace Church like everybody else, and he preached there during the war. He was in the army during the war, stationed in Virginia Beach as a chaplain. I don’t rightly know how he came to know the Reverend Wilcox, but he started coming to Piedmont on weekends. Oh, so many of the women were bowled over by the Reverend Robert Medina from California. He was a very handsome man, very charming, but he always struck me wrong. Too charming, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
Mrs. Marsden’s cook appeared in the door.
When they were settled at the dining room table with steaming bowls of stew, she resumed. “I remember he gave a sermon once. Everyone thought it was so wonderful. I did too!” She leaned forward and whispered, eyes twinkling, “Mr. Davenport told me a few years later that he stole it.”
Regina drew back, wide-eyed. “What do you mean?”
“Plagiarized it. Mr. Davenport was a very well-read man. He said he came across that very sermon not long afterward.”
Regina sat with her mouth open. Then she thought of something she had never told a living soul. “You know what?”
Ellen Marsden leaned in and said, “What?”
“He quotes the Bible about everything, and I used to wonder how he could possibly recite so much of it, until one day I tried to look up something he’d said that sounded crazy to me, and that was when I realized he was just making up most of it to suit himself.”
Ellen Marsden threw her head back and laughed. Regina joined her, but her smile faded as it dawned on her for the first time that he’d quoted all the most prurient verses only to her, and only when no one else was listening. She shuddered.
Mrs. Marsden broke into her thoughts. “I’ll tell you something else. Mrs. Eloise Hurd was another one of our friends at Farmville. She married a man from Hampden-Sydney, and they lived right there in Farmville for a long time. They’re retired now and living in Florida, but he had a law office right there on Main Street.”
Regina took a bite of stew, which was restoring her almost as much as the gossip about Robert Medina. The cook came to see if everything was all right.
When she left, Regina prompted Mrs. Marsden to continue. “Did the Hurds know Robert?”
“Hmm? Oh yes. You know he was the youth minister at Hope Presbyterian after the war.”
“Yes, for a year. He left—”
“They fired him.”
Again Regina’s jaw dropped. “I knew he was angry. Mary said they—” What had Mary said? Mrs. Marsden waited. “Mary never was very clear, and nobody told me anything, as usual. But Mary made it sound like Robert was the one who got treated wrongly. Why did they fire him?”
Mrs. Marsden laid down her fork. “I will tell you something that is pure gossip of the lowest kind. But it’s something I think it might help you to know.”
Regina leaned forward. The room was softly lighted. Cozy. Warm enough to make her drowsy.
“My Arletta told me that she heard that Reverend Medina was involved in an immoral relationship with one of the girls in the church. I heard the silly girl thought she was in love with him, chased him.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“Well, true, people do tend to blame the girl. Poor little Marybeth Summers it was, only fifteen years old. She dropped out of school and went to Haven Acres.”
“Haven Acres!”
Mrs. Marsden raised her eyebrows and cocked her head. “Now, how would you know about Haven Acres?”
“The company I work for made some posters for them last year.” She was momentarily uncomfortable, wondering what the gossip was about her when she ran away. Then she thought back to when Robert was at Hope. That would have been the late fifties. “He was married to Mary at the time.”
“Oh yes, he was married.”
“Mary didn’t move to Farmville with him because of me.”
“Well, I think it might have been more because of your mother, Regina.”
That was almost too much to process. She put down her knife and fork and folded her hands in her lap, feeling quieter and easier than she had in a long time. She took a deep breath.
As Regina ran the conversation back in her mind, she said, “Who is Arletta?”
“She worked for me for thirty-five years. She died a couple of years ago. Arletta Rawley.”
Regina blinked. “Rawley?”
“Yes, she was Sam Rawley’s wife. He worked for your father a long time ago, for a good long while. They let him go. And it was his son who got into so much trouble when their daughter died.”
“Robert Medina was behind that.”
“That was what I heard at the time.”
The cook brought coffee and a plate of cookies.
Regina bit off a piece and said, “I met him once, Sam Rawley. He scared me half to death.”
“Why?”
“He was angry. I guess I know why now. But he was drunk and raving about ‘you Hannons.’”
“Yes, well, he had plenty to be mad about. Anyone can see you’re a Hannon. A Wilcox girl. He had no love for your family. The Hannons or the Wilcoxes. They were all the same to him. You know what the Wilcoxes did to Arletta’s sister, don’t you?”
Regina shook her head.
“She worked for the Wilcoxes a long time ago. And when their daughter drowned, they blamed Arletta’s sister, Maisie.”
Regina paused, a cookie halfway to her mouth. She shook her head. “Wait. Arletta’s—Mrs. Rawley’s sister was Maisie?”
“Maisie Binkum. Binkum was Arletta’s maiden name. And no, she wasn’t responsible for watching those little girls. She was a housemaid. But they blamed her for what happened, sure enough. She couldn’t get work anywhere after that. They said she was drunk and doing I don’t know what with that boy she was seeing. Poor girl killed herself over it. Hanged herself in the woods out back of her sister’s house.” She pointed over her shoulder. “Right here on the Shackley Road.”
Regina sat back, stunned. Pictured the woman who came to her rescue the day she was so frightened by the angry old man. “What did Arletta look like?”
“I’ll show you a picture.”
Ellen Marsden bustled to an old desk and returned with an album. She flipped through a few pages, then shook her head. “Now where? Oh, I know.”
She went back to the desk an
d returned with a picture in a cardboard folder from a photographer’s studio. A picture of two middle-aged women dressed in Sunday finery: Mrs. Marsden in a hat and an old-fashioned-looking dress, and a woman whose face Regina recognized.
Then Regina snatched the picture and stared, whispering, “Oh my God.”
“What?”
Arletta’s hair. Waved, smoothly coifed, and held behind her ear by a flower-shaped silver-and-crystal hairpin.
22
What To Do
She arrived at her office just before nine, wide awake despite having been up half the night finishing all the components of her project. The long, comforting dinner with Mrs. Marsden had ended on a somber note. At first, the older woman was clearly skeptical that Arletta Rawley was wearing Eugenie’s hairpin. When Regina handed her the perfect match to the pin in the photograph, Mrs. Marsden fingered it a long moment.
“Where did you say you got that?”
“This one is from Blue Lake.” She explained about the suitcase of Eugenie’s clothes. “There were two pins originally. This one was in Eugenie’s hair when she died.” She pointed at the picture. “That’s the other one.”
“Or another one just like it.”
“Could be,” Regina admitted. But she didn’t believe it. “Where did Arletta get hers?”
“I don’t rightly know.” But she added reluctantly, “I believe she said her husband gave it to her.”
“Sam Rawley.”
Mrs. Marsden nodded slowly, then narrowed her eyes. “What do you think this proves?”
“It doesn’t prove anything.”
She’d left it at that, left Mrs. Marsden holding the picture of Arletta.
Upstairs in her room, she’d taken another nap, then gotten up and worked until dawn. This time, for some reason, she met the howling memories with confidence and knew exactly what she wanted to do. She chose warm, peaceful, soothing colors and rich tones for her designs. The images were bright, optimistic, lighthearted. She turned to the brochure text.
Blue Lake Page 20