by Carly Bishop
She wiped down each one so far as she could reach with her gloves. He watched her stroking the finish, watched pleasure and satisfaction wash over her at uncovering the doors, and he felt a kick of pleasure for her.
But he thought she was reminded, when she looked at him to share her delight, of what it was she’d been avoiding while she uncovered her antique doors.
Her smile faded. Tossing her gloves aside, she shrugged. “It was almost enough.”
“It is enough, Amy. All the rest is just, just... what do they say? Sound and fury—”
“Signifying nothing,” she signed, her long slender fingers fading to “nothing.” He thought for a minute that she might go along with it, but she didn’t. She tossed her gloves aside and went to the sideboard in the dining room. She held up the front page of the Sunday Post. “Did you see this?”
He could see from where he stood the file photo of her father below the fold, and headlines that read simply, Justice Reeves?
He strode toward her and took the copy. The byline was Zach Hollingsworth, no lightweight. He read quickly through the copy and looked at Amy. “Did you know about any of this before you read it here?”
She shook her head. “All I’ve ever known, Cy, is that my mother’s mother was named Jessup—and that her family were very wealthy California vintners. I wouldn’t know it now but Jessie—a friend, also the interpreter I employ in my own work, called early this morning to warn me.”
Cy nodded. “Is your father upset about this?”
“Apparently not. I haven’t heard from him.” She took the paper from him and put it aside. “But what I want to know is whether or not you believed my uncle.”
He met her eyes. “Why don’t you let this be, Amy? Let yourself enjoy—”
“Will you answer my question?”
“I had a few doubts, but—”
“Can you tell me why?”
“I’m not sure that would be helpful—or that it even matters.”
“Well, I think we were being spoon-fed, Cy. I’m not good at ferreting out hidden agendas—”
“Just doors, huh?” He touched her hair and gave a bit of a smile. “Trust me, Amy. On the whole this has to be a lot more gratifying.”
She fumed a little. “I don’t want to make a career of it, McQuaid. I just want to know what your doubts were.”
Right now his doubts were running high that after rattling all the family skeletons, it wasn’t going to matter. She had too easily dismissed the Hollingsworth piece, but maybe that was simple healthy skepticism.
“All right,” she signed, taking his silence for a refusal to share his doubts. “I’ll tell you mine.” She turned and walked through to the dining room and took a picnic basket off the built-in sideboard. Spreading a checkered cloth on the floor, she indicated he should get drinks from the cooler. “Wine for me.” He twisted the top off a bottle of beer and pulled the pewter-topped cork on her bottle of Chardonnay, pouring a large plastic cup half full for her.
“There’s egg salad, or tuna.” She produced a tray of relishes—hearts of palm, pickled okra, olives, a couple of banana peppers.
“Egg.” He bit into a pepper. “I love eggs. Love them.” He took a pull of the bottled beer, then wiped the back of his hand over his lips. “Amy, what is this about?”
She finished doling egg salad onto thick slices of bread, then put them on two plates and passed him one. She left hers sitting there untouched. “I don’t trust that what my uncle told us is the whole truth.”
Cy cocked a brow up. “You were only five. How would you know what the truth is?”
He was mocking her uncle’s comment. “I grew up with the man, Cy. He’s patted me on the head like that most of my life. It bothers me, but it wasn’t all that surprising.”
“Come on, Amy. I was there—”
“No. I was hurt and I looked away, it’s true. I didn’t want to see that condescending attitude in him. But then he was looking at me, staring hard, you know? Like you do when you’re warning someone to shut up or quit arguing or to stop doing what they’re doing.”
She paused, checking to see if he had followed her meaning. When he nodded, she went on. “He did the same thing to me the morning after my mother died.”
Cy frowned. Trouble was, he believed her because he had one fairly uncivilized attitude toward her uncle already. “Did you know what had happened to your mother then?”
She shook her head. “I only knew she wasn’t there.”
“Did you look for her?”
“Everywhere, yes. But I knew I wouldn’t find her. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that she had run away after all.”
“They must have taken her body away the night before.”
“Yes. When I couldn’t find her I went outside. My father was out there. I was hiding in the shadows on the porch when the men in white coats—honest to God, that’s how I thought of them at the time—took my grandmother away.”
Cy swore under his breath. She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know, except the details, but it was through the finer points that he was finally beginning to understand.
She nodded. “It was horrible. They carried Fee out on a stretcher, and there was this posey thing—”
He interrupted her. “What kind of thing?”
“A posey. It’s made of cloth, sort of like a straitjacket with wrist restraints, but it’s intended to keep a patient tied to the bed—sort of like a doll, you know? How dolls come in boxes tied to the cardboard?”
“I don’t have a lot of experience with dolls.”
“But you know what I mean?”
He nodded. The image made him sick. “Where the hell was your father all this time?”
“In the car with my grandmother.”
“He went with her?”
“Yes.” Her chin quivered once, and if that wasn’t enough, tears pricked at her eyelids. “After they drove off, Uncle Perry turned around and saw me standing there on the porch. He started coming toward me.”
“Tell me, Amy. Tell me what happened.”
Her gaze fell away. She spoke with her hands, describing what she saw in her mind’s eye. “Our house was...is secluded. It’s tucked away up on a silent mountain surrounded by pine. No one was ever around who hadn’t come there on purpose. No neighbors.” The sky she described was gray, overcast, dropping fat snowflakes. “I was so scared.”
“Of your uncle,” he signed, because she wasn’t looking at his lips.
“Yes. His eyes...”
He had to ask, had to be clear. There was too much at stake to make a mistake. He drew her attention to his face. “Are you sure, Amy?”
“Sure that he was threatening me?”
“Are you certain that what you were seeing wasn’t just how appalled or upset your uncle was that no one was there to make sure you didn’t—”
“I am sure.” A tear spilled. She backhanded it “My uncle is not a stupid man, Cy. He knew there was no one left to watch over me.”
Chapter Seven
She had no one.
It was as simple as that. No one but her uncle. Her mother had disappeared, her grandmother had been carted off and her father had gone, too, accompanying his mother on her short trip to the ritzy asylum.
Cy had never known what it was like to be as alone as Amy must have been. He’d lost his mother and had fallen out with his father, but he’d at least had his brothers, Cameron, and later Matt. And Susan.
Even Brent couldn’t be counted an ally for Amy, whether he had ever intended to hurt her or not.
“So what you saw when your uncle turned around and found you standing there was... what? A threat?”
She nodded. “He had that little-pitchers-have-big-ears look that meant all this—everything that had happened—was my fault.”
Fault was about all he understood in everything she had signed. “Your fault?”
She nodded again.
“I don’t get it.” Frustration began to gnaw at h
im. Time and again he’d been in the same position with Seth, and the memories choked him. “Amy, I’m lost. I don’t know what you’re telling me, beginning with ‘little pitchers.’” He repeated her signing. “Is that what you meant?”
“Yes.” She slowed down. “Fiona used to say it. ‘Little pitchers have big ears.’ It was a nonsense thing she meant as a veiled warning to the others to be careful of what they were saying around me.”
He caught it this time. “Because you might overhear something you shouldn’t?”
“Exactly.” Her head dipped low, then she looked at him again. “That’s what Granny Fee meant, I think, when she said I was a difficult child to love.” Again she waited to be sure he was following. He was. “They could never be sure what I saw, Cy, or what I heard. I wouldn’t stay in bed. I wanted to know what was going on.”
He picked up his egg salad sandwich, but it never got close to his mouth. He had no appetite, just an ugly opinion.
“I’m not a little pitcher anymore, Cy. Don’t treat me like one.”
She meant that he shouldn’t edit what he was thinking, shouldn’t not say what was on his mind. Maybe she needed to know to be sure she wasn’t making these things up.
“It makes me believe Fiona was right, Amy. It makes me want to know what was going on inside that house that made it necessary for a five-year-old child to turn herself into such a vigilant little pair of ears.”
Her eyes lingered on his lips, it seemed to him forever long, until she signed, “Me too.”
She had intended no intimacy with her prolonged gaze. Still, an awareness spiked like a fever between them. He dropped his gaze, studied the beads of cold sweat on his beer bottle.
“I have to find out, Cy. I need your help.”
He felt his Adam’s apple plunge. She drew him like a moth to a flame. She refused to be quelled, silent, too nice, not herself, or to stay put at all. She sat here baring her soul, asking for help, willing to expose the lies in what she had always believed. He didn’t know another woman as honest as Amy, or as daring.
The others, the women he’d known, were no more substantial in his memory now than paper dolls.
Against all odds, Amy was the woman that had made him feel like a man again. He had to weigh all that against the fact that she was deaf, that he didn’t know if he could cope with it.
He had every intention of exposing whatever game it was her uncle was playing, but he meant to do it himself and he meant to spare her. She might be accustomed to being dismissed by her uncle but he was only the tip of the iceberg. It took no imagination to see the press painting the FBI just bent enough on clearing Byron Reeves that it would court the “recovered memories” of a woman gone deaf by the trauma of her fall. Let alone the murder of her mother by her own father...
Most of all, he didn’t know how he could help her without getting in deeper, without caring too much what became of her. Without putting his heart into bridging the chasm between hearing and not, and having her later hack the bridge to pieces when she discovered he didn’t have it in him to go the distance with her.
Then some jokester part of him laughed inside his head. He already cared too much.
Still he struggled to keep a distance. “Amy, there is no way that you were responsible for what happened.”
“Is that a ‘no,’ McQuaid?”
In English the question was plain enough. In her hands, “no” took on shades of hedging, the aspect of running scared, allusions that captured his feelings so well that another image, of Amy as the starving she-wolf, paralyzing her prey with her eyes alone, invaded his head.
He felt ridiculous. She was asking for help, not the right to mother his children. It was his own fault to imagine the distance between one thing and the next wasn’t so great.
His answer was no answer at all, only another question. “What I don’t get, Amy, is what your uncle thought he would accomplish by scaring the hell out of you. Or by what stretch of the imagination he blamed you for everything that had happened.”
She left her focus on his hands only so long as was absolutely necessary. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”
“You weren’t responsible for what happened.”
“Maybe not directly.”
“Not even indirectly,” he argued. “Think about it, Amy. You were a child.”
“But if my grandmother is right, I knew things, even if 1 didn’t have the least idea what it was that I knew, even if there was nothing I could do about it.”
“For example?”
“As far as my uncle was concerned, my mother was getting ready to leave for a weekend in Denver with my father. That’s not true. She was packing to leave us.”
“Maybe both things are true, Amy. Maybe she intended to go to Denver to break off with your father.”
“The end result is the same. She was leaving us, and I knew it.”
He shook his head. “Amy, don’t take this the wrong way, but you were only five, and it’s been a very long time. The only way you could possibly have known that your mother was running away was if she told you—”
“No,” she interrupted, signing, “I knew it when she sent Brent away and told him to take me with him.” When he said nothing, only waited, she went on. “I know this isn’t what I said before, but—”
She broke off so abruptly that he knew she was having a hard time accounting to herself for glossing over the gritty details two days before when she had always known better. “The truth is, I was expected not to make a scene, to pretend and go out to play as if everything was all right. As if she wasn’t planning to ditch me...us.”
Her hands clasped tightly together. Sometimes her brilliantly expressive signing betrayed her. He knew what she was thinking: If only I hadn’t been a such a difficult child to love, my mother might never have conspired to ditch me. Her slender knuckles whitened. The last time he’d noticed such a thing, his own mother was clutching her bible while the life remaining in her body bled itself out.
Amy’s spine curled inward. Her shoulders sank low in a weary, bone-tired sort of posture. She nibbled the spoonful of egg salad off the bread, washed it down with half the wine he had poured her, then straightened.
He could barely swallow, hardly speak, but he mouthed the words and it was good enough. “Spell it out for me, Amy.”
“There was something terribly wrong in my house long before my mother died. Something that had to do with me.”
He turned and wedged the cooler between the side wall of the dining room and his back so that he could lean against something and stretch out his leg. “My mother died when I was a kid, too.”
Stricken, she waited for him to go on, every aspect of her attention pinned on emotion she couldn’t even hear in his voice. He didn’t know why he’d started this. He didn’t want to notice how he needed to tell her.
“She miscarried. We lived twenty miles out of the nearest town. An ice storm had come up out of nowhere, but the calving started that afternoon and my old man had taken the pickup out to try to save what few he could. The phone lines were down. I couldn’t have gotten her any help if I tried.”
Cy couldn’t even put into words how devastated he’d been because his dad had left him in charge, and his mother died on his watch. “I prayed really hard instead, right up until I fell asleep.” He broke off.
He cleared his throat. “I always believed she wouldn’t have died it I hadn’t fallen asleep. Kids are like that. They always blame themselves.”
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
He shrugged, still trying to ignore her eyes welling up on his account. It was just like her. “I was making a point. I don’t remember my mother very much anymore.”
“That doesn’t make the loss any less painful.”
He swallowed. “No. It doesn’t.”
Her tears subsided and she went on, letting him off the hook. “Cy, I wish I could believe that blaming myself as any child would do is all there is to this. I could e
ven accept that I imagined the threat to me in my uncle Perry’s eyes after they took Fiona away. But I wasn’t imagining the same look yesterday when I contradicted him over my father’s opinions. You saw it. Tell me. Am I wrong?”
“No.” Cy shook his head. “You’re not wrong, Amy.” Perry Reeves had intended to embellish the doubt and uncertainty, to make mercilessly clear that nothing she remembered could be taken seriously.
Being deaf, she couldn’t possibly know or have heard her father’s opinions on any number of subjects.
What could she know for sure, at all?
What could she have heard?
And finally, what did she really want—her father’s career to be destroyed based on what a crazy old woman believed a five-year-old had known?
He stared at the piles of brick and rubble, and knew exactly why she’d taken on the job of destroying the brick wall facings herself.
Tears glittered in her eyes, but suddenly she smiled through them. It pierced him to the heart. He found himself trying to memorize what amusement looked like in her eyes, on her lips. Despite her teasing over his never smiling, he hadn’t seen much merriment from her either. “Tell me.”
“I was just picturing myself in that big old Gothic house, a forlorn little urchin with this huge pair of ears.” She paused, still smiling. “They couldn’t lock me in my room. At least, no one ever did. And I didn’t mind very well—obviously.”
For a man who needed a tight rein on his attention, he wasn’t managing well. Still, he thought maybe now she could be dissuaded or distracted from needing to find out for herself what had been so wrong in her house. A slow grin took over his lips.
“What?” she signed.
“I’m betting not a lot has changed. That’s all.”
She sat very still. “That depends upon who wants what from me.”
His breathing grew suddenly shallow. He could no longer be certain at all of her meaning, but suddenly what he wanted from her became the issue.
What he was doing here.
Why he had come.
What else besides his investigation he had on his mind. The attraction he’d believed they could contain. From the moment he had touched her cheek in her father’s study, they’d been at this risk.