“Have it your way, ma’am.”
The short, squat officer grabbed my wrist and spun me around sharply, slapping handcuffs on me. He pulled a laminated card from his shirt pocket and began to read. "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you."
I managed to gather myself together to present an imperious front, although I was shaking inside. "I demand that you remove these handcuffs! This is some sort of sick joke, some kind of perverse crank, and I demand that you release me this instant!"
"C'mon grandma, cut the act. We're going downtown." The muscular cop grabbed my arm and pulled me out the door.
"Ellen! Have Novella call Kay and Martin Rathke! Immediately!" I called out, as the policeman laid his heavy hand on my head and pushed me into the cruiser. The car door slammed shut, as Novella and Ellen stood slack-jawed at my front door. The car backed down the drive and into the street. I fell against the seat cushions in despair. What was going on? Why hadn't Lovey listened to me?
My God, all of this in front of Ellen Nussey; she is to the Jubilant Falls Country Club what CNN is to the nation. I'll never be able to show my face again. I'm ruined! Martin, yes, Martin will fix this! He's got to! This has all got to be one big mistake. I never knew any specific details, so they can’t make anything stick. I got a thinly veiled threat over the phone, and I went right to Lovey with it. Yes. That's it. I had nothing to do with this. Nothing at all. Grant Matthews was responsible for all of this. Grant Matthews and Lovey McNair; it was all their doing, not mine. How could I ever get myself out of this mess? This is all one big mistake. One horrible mistake. Martin will see to it that everything gets ironed out.
The cruiser slowed down. Oh God, don't let me be seen by anyone I know. I lowered my head in mortification.
"Looks like they've got the other one," the shorter cop said, pointing.
I looked up to see the McNair's Tudor monstrosity to my left.
There, in front of the house, was another black-and-white police cruiser. I snapped to attention as the front door opened and two officers escorted an undaunted and imperious Lovey McNair to the squad car.
Editor Jess Hoffman. Had that vile reporter Marcus Henning been the target? Had he been injured? If he had, could it be tied to me?
Why hadn't I said anything to Kay? The more you know, the more it can be tied to you, Lovey had said. I really had known everything and done nothing about it. A silly letter, that theatrical conversation in Lovey's bedroom. If only Montgomery was still alive! Yes, Monty could have fixed it. He would have made sure all the charges were dropped, made sure everything was smoothed over with a minimum of fuss. But he wasn't; he was dead. Paul Armstrong was dead, too. Had my scheme to reconcile Kay and Paul succeeded, this would never have happened. And my parents, my parents! I loved my mother so much. I had to do it, though. I had to do it.
Why did everyone I love have to die?
Ma, no! It's not your fault. It's all mine! He told me it was! Said I made him! No Ma, put the gun! Put down the gun!
The police car slowed almost to a stop, long enough for me to watch Lovey regally survey her realm as she stepped into the police car. Her gaze extended to the street, blinking in sudden confusion as she recognized me. Suddenly, she lost her footing on her slate steps and stumbled. The two police officers on either side of her caught her before she fell and slid her bulky frame into the back seat. I turned my head away, in shame.
My cruiser accelerated gently, moving the car back into the line of traffic as the tall, thin driver picked up the radio microphone. "Dispatch, eleven-oh-one.”
"Eleven-oh-one, ten-two." The dispatcher's voice crackled, in response.
"We're ten-nineteen, ETA ten minutes, with a ten-fifteen, one Marian James. "
"Eleven-oh-one at oh-nine-forty-five hours.”
Montgomery would have never allowed this to happen.
Arriving downtown at the police station, I was photographed, fingerprinted and searched by a big lesbian-looking deputy, who patted me down in an all-too-familiar way. Afterwards, she led me down the hall to a plain, gray, cinder-block room. It was empty, except for a small, medical examining table.
"All females charged with felonies have to submit to a body cavity search, before being placed in a cell," she said flatly.
"What? You must be joking!"
"You heard me." The deputy folded her arms and stood beside the door. "The doc will be in here in a minute. Take off everything from the waste down, and get up on the table."
"Can't I have some privacy?" I pleaded.
"No, ma'am."
I cringed and turned my back, old familiar feelings of being hunted and trapped rising from deep inside me. Behind me, the door opened and closed. I heard the snap of a rubber glove. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"Relax, honey. This won't take long." A man's gruff voice, raspy from too many cigarettes, filled the room.
Someone nearby started screaming. I felt myself drift to the ceiling, free and child-like. Who was that lady on the floor? Ma, can you tell me? Why was she making all that noise? Why was she all curled up in the corner like that? Ma? Ma?
* * *
Everybody turned out for the funeral in that scrappy little West Virginia coal town where even Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal never seemed to reach far enough.
One by one, the mourners filed past my brothers and me at the churchyard gate, shaking our hands in turn, congratulating us on what a wonderful service it had been. How wonderful and how sad.
Such a nice woman, your mother, they all told my brothers.
No one spoke to me, though, sixteen years old and painfully self-conscious in my borrowed, ill-fitting, black dress and the pair of heavy brogans that had belonged to my brothers.
Each person who passed looked at me as if I were some animal at the zoo, awkwardly taking my hand as if I would give him or her a disease, or something. Numb and alone, I heard my brothers respond with nods and thank-yous. Only the pastor looked me in the eye.
"Time will heal your wounds, Marian. Pray to God, and he will heal your heart."
I hung my head in shame. Only he knew the truth, that Ma had shot herself with Pa's big pistol when I told her what he been doing to me while she worked third shift at the cannery down the road.
"Thank you, Rev'rund. I'm sure she'll be just fine in a few days." My oldest brother Conrad, tall and lanky like Ma had been, looked so funny in Pa's best suit, his muscles bulging through the shoulders of the jacket, his sleeves rolled up to cover the shortness of the sleeves. Pa would have worn it, if he’d been sober enough to come. Since he hadn't, it was up to Conrad to stand up for him, and he done it real good.
The pastor laid his hand briefly on Conrad's shoulder and walked back into the white, frame church.
My other brothers, Jarred and Otis, older than me by two and three years, stood sulkily beside Conrad in the dirt road flecked with coal dust as the last of the mourners filed out. Jarred pointed down the road at a clump of women, gray as the coal town that surrounded them, standing together and whispering.
"Ole bitches. Ole two-faced bitches." He picked up a rock, ready to heave it at the group.
"Stop it, damn it," Conrad yanked the rock away from Jarred. "Just ignore 'em."
"Why you hafta tell?" Jarred turned on me. "If you o’ just kept your mouth shut, we still have her. She’d still be alive, if it wasn't for you!"
"Shut up, Jar…you doesn’t know what you're talkin' ‘bout!" Otis grabbed his shirtsleeves, swinging my brother around to face him. "You ain't laid there, night after night, hearin' what I heard!"
"We all heard it, Otis. We all heard it." Conrad, always the peacemaker, yanked my brothers apart with his strong hands. "I don't recollect either of you-uns ever doin' anything ‘bout it either, so just shut up."
"He’d killed all of us, Con
, and you know it!" Jarred turned his anger on our brother. "We all know where he is now, too. He's down at Flagler's, drunker'n a skunk, if ole man Flagler hasn't already thrown him out."
"I know it, Jar."
"The whole town's talking ‘bout her…everybody knows the truth now." Jarred pointed his bony finger at me. I hung my head again, too guilty to speak. "They're sayin’ we all took turns with her, that she let us, that she wanted it."
“Shut up! Shut up, both of you!" Otis screamed, knocking Jarred to the ground. He pinned Jarred's arms down with his legs and sat on his chest, beating his face bloody with his fists. "You dirty bastard! Don't you talk ‘bout my sister like that! Don't you ever say it!"
Jarred pushed Otis from atop him. They fell together, like twin timbers, rolling together across the fresh dirt of Ma's grave, mixing blood and earth as they traded blows.
"She killed her, just as if she pulled the trigger herself!" Will cried out. "If she kept her mouth shut, Ma would still be alive!"
"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" I screamed in anguish. "I can't stand this any more! I can't stand it!" Pushing past Conrad into the street, I ran through the horrified knot of women, knowing that this time I was running to save my own life.
* * *
"The sedative I gave her should put her to sleep for at least four hours." Somewhere on the fuzzy edge of reality, I heard Ed Nussey speak. I was back in my own bed, in my own nightgown. Someone pulled the eyelet comforter up to my chin.
"There now," a warm voice said. "You just close your eyes. You're back home."
"What do you know about her past?" Ed asked. "From what the deputies at the jail told me, I would suspect that there has been some serious sexual abuse or trauma in her past. Were you aware of anything like that?"
The warm voice slurred unintelligibly, through my drugged mind.
I felt darkness, warmth, and comfort begin to envelope me. I was safe now. I was home. In Jubilant Falls. No one would ever find me here.
* * *
My heart was pounding in my ears, as I threw open the door to the tarpaper shack my brothers and me called home. My folks’ bedroom, the only bedroom, was empty. In the big room, nobody sat in the ugly, beat-up couch, or the ragged overstuffed chair with three legs, or at the table where Ma had took her life. Someone had left behind a casserole of chicken and dumplings; someone else had made the attempt to scrub the blood from the wall behind the table, but it had stained a reddish-brown. I knew Conrad would spend Sunday, his only day off from working the mines, painting it. It was just his way.
I shimmied up the ladder, to the attic where my brothers and me slept. When I turned ten, Ma insisted that two old sheets be sewn together to separate the wide, attic space. A growing girl needed her privacy after all, she had said.
Pa had smiled in a way I didn't like. He tried one night to slip his hands down the front of my nightgown, when the boys was out and Ma was working, but Conrad came home early, and Pa had warned me never to speak of it.
Still, the curtain went up the next day. It was like a big, ole permission slip, them two sewn-together bed sheets. Six years of it, night after awful night; he left me alone only the week before I got my period and nights when Ma was home. Pa come home punch drunk from Flagler’s Tavern, climb the ladder, with the boys lying right on the other side of those sheets, and say those awful words that I never forget.
Hold still, honey.
Hold still, and this won't hurt.
Don't scream…someone will hear you. I'll be done, soon.
Don't scream, or I'll hit you again.
Don't scream, damn you, don't scream!
No, I wouldn't scream anymore, because I was getting away. I yanked the sheets from the nails that attached them to the ceiling and, real fast, put all my stuff into it: another dress, some underwear, the quilt from my bed that Ma had made. I took Conrad's Bowie knife from beneath the mattress that he and Otis shared.
No more whispers. No more secrets. Like Jarred said, everybody knew the truth, now. But everybody was wrong. It wasn't my fault. I had to leave. Pa said if I ever told anybody, he’d kill me. I told, and now Ma was dead. The whole world knew. I swung my bundle over my shoulder. It wouldn't happen again. Nobody would ever do that to me again.
Downstairs, the screen door rattled on its hinges as Pa staggered in drunk, as usual.
"Marian!" he bellowed. "Marian, you teasin' little slut! I know you're in here."
I froze. Below me in the big room, the chicken and dumplings crashed to the floor as Pa fell against the table, bellowing like a bull. "Where are you, you little whore?"
I stepped to the top of the ladder. "Up here, Pa." I slid my belongings from my shoulder and knelt at the edge. Slowly, I pulled out Conrad's knife.
"I told you never to say nothin’ to nobody, didn't I?" Pa slurred, as he started up the ladder. "Well, you little slut, you done got me fired. Ain't got a job now to support your ass or them worthless brothers of yern, all because of you ‘n’ yer big mouth.”
"No, Pa. That ain't my fault." The words came out calmly, as I locked both hands around the knife handle and raised it above my head. If I couldn't do it right the first time, he’d kill me, and nobody would ever find my body. "You did it all to me and I ain't lettin' you do it anymore."
Pa was laughing, as his head came up through the opening in the attic floor. "And how you gonna stop me, Missy? I can break your neck with one—"
I shoved that knife into his chest, as hard as I could. I felt something hard, then a warm wetness as the blade went in. The knife slid back out so easily, I thought I missed. Then blood went everywhere – Lord, I never seen so much blood – as Pa fell backwards down the ladder, breaking every rung.
I watched for a minute, while he lay there, trying to get up, trying to stop the blood from coming out that big, old hole, making funny animal sounds and reaching up for me, wanting help. I never seen nobody die before. I felt so apart from it, as I watched, not caring or nothing, like when Conrad gutted that deer he got last winter when Pa wasn't working. After a while, Pa's body went limp in the red pool, his eyes still and shiny like glass.
Even as he lay dying, that twisted old bastard never once said he was sorry, never once begged for my forgiveness. His mouth would move, and there be blood coming out, and his eyes would look all panicky. But I just stared at him. Stared and watched him die.
I used to think about getting back at Pa. I used to think I’d run away, or I’d kill him, just like I did now. I used to plan it at night, when he be laying on top of me, rutting like a pig. I had all kinds of different ways to do it; rat poison in the thermos of coffee he took down to the mines was one. I kept a knife under my pillow, ‘til he found it.
I thought when I did really kill him, when it really happened, I’d feel like I won. I thought I be proud of getting him away from me forever. But I wasn't. I was scared, more scared than I’d ever been in my whole life. I killed both my parents.
I picked up my stuff all rolled up in them sheets, jumped down from the attic, and ran into the woods. Nobody would ever find me, I vowed. Nobody would ever know who the real Marian was.
And for a long time, nobody did. I put myself through secretarial school at night, while working days in a munitions plant in Charleston during the war. When the war was over, I moved to Ohio, got a job at Plummer County Community Hospital as the secretary on one of the wards, then met and married the best looking resident on the floor.
Dr. Montgomery James was not only a doctor he was a war hero. In France, he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for going in under German fire to save a fellow soldier who been hit in the chest by shrapnel. Monty took a bullet in the leg for his trouble, but managed to drag the wounded solider to safety.
We were so happy. Montgomery James was tall and handsome, with dark, red hair and a face like Tyrone Power. He knew everything about me, except that I killed Pa, and he loved me anyway.
After a few years, I had mor
e money and prestige than I ever dreamed. For once in my life, people envied me. I couldn't let them down. I couldn't let them see that down underneath all the fancy clothes, the fancy car, and the money, I held a darker secret than anyone could imagine.
But the voices were right. It took nearly fifty years, but they found me. Now everybody knew the truth.
* * *
"Mother, I really think you ought to see a psychiatrist."
"I do not need a psychiatrist!" Shakily, I pulled my handkerchief from the sleeve of my bed jacket and clumsily dabbed at my lipstick. I had not left the sanctuary of my bedroom since my arrest, but remained propped up on my pillows, unable to speak to anyone for two days. The voices kept me there. Beneath my comforter in my own bed, they stayed quiet, particularly when I had company. But when I was alone and out of bed, the voices came: Ma with her hair tied back and in her coffin clothes, walking the floor beside me; Pa in his pool of blood, reaching up for me whenever I tried to step on the floor.
Marian, they said. We know the truth. We know the truth.
So I stayed in my bed where I was safe.
Then Kay came to visit me with the children, with all her supposed concern and her silly idealism. I hadn't protected her or her children. By ruining myself, I had ruined her, too.
"I don't need a psychiatrist!" I repeated, handing Andrew and Lillian a box of Godiva chocolates, a gift from Ed and Ellen Nussey.
"Please, don't give the kids so much sugar, Mother. Andrew, leave your sister alone," Kay wrestled the box from the children and put it back in my lap. "Kids, why don't you see if Novella has any goodies for you in the kitchen?" The children clamored noisily from the room, and Kay closed the door behind them. "Now Mother, there is obviously something in your past that caused you to break down at the jail.”
“I don’t think that’s anything you need to concern yourself with,” I said, folding my arms.
“Mother, they have medications that can help people with these illnesses. Mental illness is not something to be ashamed of any more!”
The Major's Wife (Jubilant Falls series Book 2) Page 18