by C F Dunn
“You are not welcome here. What do you want?”
She disregarded his question and instead shifted her gaze, letting her barbed, greedy eyes roll down and then up my body, making me feel exposed. Resting on my hair, they burned, envy oozing out of her like larva.
“I see you’ve brought someone to comfort you in your grief and with your wife no sooner than in the ground. Matthew, I’m surprised at you. How did Ellen take it when she found out you had already replaced her with a younger model? Does this girl know your secret, I wonder? Well, do you, my dear?” She paused, and when I didn’t answer, gave a little dismissive shrug. “It doesn’t matter. I did enjoy your performance on Friday, by the way; it was surprisingly entertaining and I’m so looking forward to tomorrow – who knows what a new day might bring?”
Matthew emitted a low, threatening noise deep in the back of his throat and she took a rapid step back, her high, black-heeled shoes sinking into the thawing earth.
“You haven’t answered my question, Monica. You long since relinquished the right to comment on my family.”
Her gloved hand patted her chest in a dramatic flurry. “Don’t forget, Matthew, that I still have an interest in part of it.” She looked meaningfully at Maggie, who stared at her mother with the round eyes of a startled child. “When you came to see me after the accident, I really thought you were going to kill me – oh, you looked so angry; but really, you’ve been perfectly sweet all these years, keeping me in a manner to which I have grown very accustomed.”
Henry shot a puzzled glance at his father, and Monica turned her attention to him. “Didn’t you know, darling? Matthew’s been keeping me quiet. He’s been paying me all these years to keep me away from you all – especially from you, darling,” and she held out her hand to Maggie. “Margaret, come and say hello to Mommy.”
Maggie focused unsteadily on her mother, and her mouth slackened but no sound came. Placing himself directly between his daughter and her mother, Henry’s brow drew into deep, angry ridges. “Keep away from her, Monica. You are nothing but poison. You always were, and you always will be. I wish to God I’d killed you.”
The boys had taken up defensive positions but shifted uneasily, apparently sensing the threat this stranger brought to the family, although it seemed unequal to the frail, willowy stature of the old woman before them. They might underestimate the damage she could do, but Matthew and Henry obviously didn’t.
“Oh, Henry, you always were too soft; you need some of your father’s steel. Nobody would ever believe you capable of murder. Not like you, Matthew; who knows what you might do! Nearly strangled the man, didn’t they say in court? What stopped you? Why didn’t you finish him?” She placed her hand against her mouth in a mockery of surprise. “Could it have been this girl, possibly? ‘No! Matthew, no! You’ll kill him,’” she mimicked in a high-pitched wail. “Did this girl stop you, Matthew? Is she your conscience? You surely don’t still believe in that talisman – that institutionalized relic of a superstitious age she wears around her neck, do you?” My hand found my cross beneath my coat as she echoed the words I last heard from Staahl’s mouth that night in the porters’ lodge.
Matthew’s muscles contracted under my restraining hand, but I was equally angry. “How do you know what Staahl said?” I spat. “I’ve told nobody.”
Monica bathed in my reaction, slight colour in her pallid cheeks. “She speaks! How delightful. How do you think?” A slow smile of satisfaction spread across her face as realization dawned on mine. “That’s right – Kort Staahl. Where do you think he’s managed to get the money to pay for his legal team? Cost me – actually, cost you – top dollar, Matthew. It didn’t cost me much more than a phone call, but you’ve been so generous over the years.”
“We thought you were dead,” Pat said.
“Thought? Or hoped?” Monica’s voice cut like razor blades. Then she snickered, a high, unappealing sound. “Oh, and you children, all so handsome, so very like you, Matthew. You must be so proud.” She reached out and lightly touched Harry’s face before he knew what she was doing. He shrank back as if struck, wiping the memory of her from his skin with the sleeve of his coat. She didn’t like that. She lost any pretence of conviviality, her face stony, her eyes the colour of flints.
“It’s time you left,” Dan said, stepping between her and his children.
“And you must be Henry’s son. Dan, is it? I’m not ready to leave just yet, not until I get what I came for.”
“What do you want?” Dan asked, lowering. “More money?”
Monica ignored him and turned to Matthew. “Money?” she sneered, reminding me acutely of Maggie at Christmas. “Oh, I don’t need your money. I have more than enough from my late husband. He was a fool as well. I seem only to have married fools, Matthew – rich, but so impotent. I almost wished Henry had tried to kill me, it would have been a little more exciting. No, money doesn’t interest me any more. I want to see you suffer, Matthew, it’s as simple as that.” Henry cursed under his breath. “Not you, Henry dear, don’t worry. I forgot all about you a long time ago. It is your father I blame. Matthew, you drove me out and kept me away for all these years. Had it not been for that little snippet in The Times I might never have known what you were up to and, who knows, I might have let sleeping dogs lie. But there you were coming to the rescue of this girl, and I just had to make a few enquiries. I was always good at that, wasn’t I? Making enquiries, getting to the bottom of things. It didn’t take much to find out where they were keeping dear Kort, and then, such a gift to find my own clever little Margaret in charge of his care.” She clasped her gloved hands, her translucent eyelids fluttering at the memory of fate playing so neatly into her hands. Pat could hardly keep her revulsion from showing. Monica gloated openly.
“Kort and I have kept up our correspondence ever since. He is such an interesting man, so full of intuition and novel ideas. I think if I were a few years younger, I might have found him quite… entertaining. Anyway, I was able to help my own sweet child at the same time as encouraging Kort to fight for his rights and humiliating you, Matthew.” A gust of wind lifted the edge of her short veil and she patted it delicately back in place. “All those little titbits of information I fed Staahl that he gave to you, Margaret, to help you reach your conclusions. Nobody will forget this trial; you will be famous, darling.” She pursed her lips as she regarded her daughter. “Of course, we must buy you some new clothes; the ones you wear are so unbecoming, but then you obviously haven’t had any guidance in that quarter.” She flashed a contemptuous glance at Pat. “Perhaps you would like to come and stay with Mommy, darling? We could have such fun; we could go shopping at Saks.”
Henry bled rage. “Don’t even begin to pretend you did this for anyone else but yourself, and certainly not for Maggie. What have you told Staahl about my father?”
Monica briefly adopted a coy expression, smiling up from under her lashes in a way that men might once have found appealing, but now looked pitiable and sleazy, like a worn-out whore in a side-street brothel.
“Oh Henry, you are just so sweet when you get cross. I haven’t told Kort anything – yet. You don’t think I would give him my ace card just like that, do you? Not that little man. No, I don’t need to tell the world about Matthew’s secret, not until I’m ready. I want to make him pay first. I want to make him suffer and squirm for all those years he deprived me of my daughter when she needed her mother most. Look at her, what have you done to her?” She pulled her face into an imitation of an agonized Madonna and held out her hand to Maggie, who moaned and put a hand to her head, closing her eyes in confusion.
“You are pathetic,” Pat flung at her. “Have you any idea of the damage you have done, and what it has taken to help Maggie through it?
“I should have been the one to help her.” Monica’s façade of civility slipped, her breath escaping in an unpleasant rasp as she thrust her head forward, forcing the thin, tautened skin of her neck into ridges over her throat musc
les like a tortoise stretching for a leaf.
Matthew had been examining her carefully and now he moved silently until he stood barely three feet away from her, so that she started when she looked around and saw how close he had come. When he spoke, he had assumed complete control of his anger, but the calm was more intimidating. It hung between them and she recognized the threat within it.
“Don’t delude yourself, Monica, it was you who left – no one drove you away – and you were only too eager to take the money you were offered to stay that way. Not once in all these years have you asked to see Maggie, or even enquired after her. Your only interest in her has been in what you could squeeze out of me.”
Monica stabbed a finger at him. “My daughter died in that crash. I was in mourning…”
“For forty-six years?” Henry said caustically. “Ellen was my daughter too. We had two children, Monica; you effectively abandoned one of them.”
Her mouth slithered into a sneer. “You blame me for the crash, but it wasn’t my fault – Margaret was crying…”
“Mommy,” Maggie stumbled forward between Henry and Dan, the remorse in her face heartbreaking. “You were so angry. I didn’t mean to cry.”
Henry held onto her arm. “It was an accident, Maggie.”
“It was my fault – it is always my fault. Ellen and Grams…” Maggie pulled, trying to free herself as she became increasingly distressed and working herself into a frenzy.
Matthew turned his back on Monica so that his granddaughter could see only him. He didn’t try to stop her, he didn’t try to touch her, but his voice dropped, taking on the mesmerizing cadence he used when he wanted to calm me.
“No, Maggie, there was ice on the road. Remember the ice in the yard at home, how you had been playing on the frozen puddles that morning with little Ellen, how you slid into each other…”
“… And I fell over and I cried and Ellen said it was just an accident. I remember – she couldn’t stop.”
“And the car couldn’t stop, Maggie. It slid on the ice and it couldn’t stop. It was just an accident.”
She looked up at him, and her expression changed from bewildered child to one of growing acceptance. “An accident?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said gently.
“But Mommy was angry with me and then she left.”
“She didn’t leave because of you.”
“I was frightened and there was shouting and then she was angry with me and then she left.”
“You were not in control, Maggie, you were just a little girl. You were not the adult, you were not responsible.”
The conversation ran between the two of them, Matthew holding her attention as he wound his way through her tortured thought processes, leading her towards comprehension now that her lifetime of defences were down.
What had been a light breeze became a fretting wind in the cooling air, and the intermittent sleet now became a steady, light snowfall that lay on our shoulders without melting.
“Mommy was driving.”
Monica’s face warped into ugly resentment. “I couldn’t hear myself think over the racket she made; she distracted me.”
“Shut up!” I heard myself hiss at her without thinking, the image of the frightened child vivid in my mind.
“Mommy was driving and there was shouting and then we crashed.”
“Yes,” said Matthew.
“It was an accident.”
“Yes, Maggie, just an accident.”
She didn’t faint as such, just became limp, like a rag doll whose stuffing has lost its vitality. Matthew caught her as she sagged, and whispered something to her. He looked over to Harry and Joel. “Boys, take Maggie to the church. This won’t take long.”
Maggie came to life again as Joel helped support her, trying to push him away although it made no impression on him. “I want to stay,” she said more strongly, and there was determination in it. Matthew nodded and Joel let go of her, but they stood protectively close and she let them, without further protest.
An old crow barked balefully from a gnarled tree close by. Matthew turned to Monica, who seemed almost to have diminished and aged within the time it took for the bird to rise heavily and fly to the belfry of the church. I heard sadness in his voice as he spoke. “What have the years done to you, Monica, that you should be so filled with hate; to what end?”
But as she shrunk, her bile concentrated. “Yours, Matthew,” she spat. “For every time I looked at you and you taunted me with your looks and your agelessness. For everything you were that I wanted. For everything I could see in Henry and the girls, but I couldn’t be. Ellen might have accepted she would get old and ugly, but I didn’t. She couldn’t understand why I had to know your secret, and she tried to stop me from finding out.”
Henry could hardly contain himself as he stared at the woman in front of him. “So all the tests, the doctors – you weren’t even trying to find out for the girls’ sakes? It was always for you, what you wanted. Their happiness didn’t figure at all?”
Monica raised one eyebrow as if it were obvious and he unreasonable to expect anything else. “Why would it? They already benefited from whatever it was Matthew has passed on to you, and it was unfair that I should miss out. Anyway, I knew they would understand when they grew up, although, as they didn’t have my beauty, how could they even begin to know what it was like finding the first lines around my eyes, watching my skin begin to sag, the first grey hairs?” She touched her fingers to her face as if she could erase the memories along with the lines.
Ellie circled the grave and came to stand next to me. Stiffly alert, she stood so close that I felt the guarded fearfulness as her eyes flicked between Monica and Matthew.
Monica looked towards me. “I must have been only a little older than you when I noticed.” Her eyes roamed longingly over me, and had she been a man, I would have described her desire in terms of lust. But she didn’t see me, she saw my youth. “Have you seen your creeping age yet? Have you looked in the mirror and wondered what you will be like in ten years’ time surrounded by all his radiance? If it hadn’t been for the crash, I would have found out what it is that preserves him. Someone would have known.”
“Leave Emma out of it, Monica; this has nothing to do with her.”
“Don’t be so naïve, Matthew – of course it has. I learned a long time ago that if I couldn’t get at you directly, I would find your Achilles’ heel and all I would need to do is prick it to watch you bleed. Kort had such an intuitive understanding of your relationship it wasn’t hard to plant some tiny suggestions and watch them grow. The book was my idea,” she crooned. “Staahl nurtured it, and dearest, darling Margaret delivered it perfectly. It wasn’t difficult to persuade Kort to play sane. It’s remarkably simple when you know what buttons to push, and he has certain… incentives. He so looks forward to seeing you again, my dear; he genuinely believes you are meant for him. He is such a hopeless romantic.”
My churning stomach rebelled at the thought of Staahl’s dead eyes, devoid of all compassion. “You’re wasting your time. I don’t give a damn what happens to me.”
“How noble of you, my dear. You might not, but Matthew does. The Lynes men are such chivalrous fools. It makes them so tediously predictable and therefore vulnerable.”
Matthew’s reactions were instantaneous as he intercepted Ellie’s hand as it fell slicing towards the woman’s neck. He held on to her raised arm firmly.
“Ellie, no, she’s not worth it.”
Her eyes flared. “But you are. This is so wrong.”
“You’re hearing the bitter thoughts of a mind intent on destruction. There is no substance to them.”
Her face crumpled and he let go of her hand, and she scrubbed angrily at the tears beginning to creep down her cheeks.
“I want to kill her.”
“There’s no need.” He turned to Monica. “How long have they given you?”
She screwed her eyes in disbelief, the words escaping thro
ugh her grid of teeth.
“How do you know?”
“You reek of death. The malice of your life is eating you from within. Whatever you have been told, you haven’t long.”
“Long enough to destroy you.”
“I think not.”
The clock tolled a mournful hour from the church, setting the crow cawing as it rose into the air in uneven spirals.
Henry broke the stunned silence. “She’s dying?”
Ellie crossed her arms over her chest. “Good.”
Monica faced Matthew, her expression no longer sly, but pleading. She grabbed at his arm, fingers biting into the fabric of his coat like claws as she clung to hope.
“You can help me, Matthew, I know you can. Whatever it is that has left you unchanged…”
He removed her hand. “There is nothing I can do.”
All her arrogance and bravado slipped away, her handsome features dissolving into those of a haggard, worn out, and sick old woman.
Matthew looked at his family and Henry nodded. “Yes, it’s time to go. Goodbye, Monica.”
He led the way with Pat over the tumbled soil towards the cars, picking the smoothest path and leaving dark footprints in the thin, wet snow. Maggie looked back at her mother, once, and the rest of the family disappeared into the encroaching snow-laden gloom as Matthew stood by the grave of his wife for a few moments more. Then, joining me, he took my arm and wove it through his.
As we passed, I swiftly glanced at Monica, only to be met by contempt, and I saw in that look how consumed by her own mortality she had become. She read my face with a shocking degree of accuracy, for out of the falling snow her voice rang piercing and shrill, “Don’t you pity me. Don’t you dare pity me!”
The windscreen wipers played a guessing game with the snow, the haphazard flurries causing the automatic sensors to switch off and on with annoying unpredictability like the intermittent drip of a tap. I gritted my teeth as the wiper blades chased another scum of oily snow off the glass, then hesitated several seconds longer than previously, before sweeping their wide arc once again.