I cringed at the picture she was creating in my mind. “You think Earl Connor did this because you … rejected him?”
She nodded. “Oh, I know he did it. He stabbed Larry first before hanging him up there. Awful, just awful.” “How do you know it was him?”
“Such a waste of life. Poor Larry,” she mumbled, ignoring my question.
I wondered then if what she had said was even a true statement. How could I take anything she said as the truth? She had severe dementia, and her memory couldn’t be that good at the moment. Then again, she knew who I was and remembered my father.
“A murderer in Seneca?” I had never heard of a so-called Earl Connor before, one who killed the husbands of the women he wanted for himself. It sounded too made up to be true.
She nodded, her disheveled hair springing back and forth with the sudden movement. “He was a sly one. Sometimes he still comes around here, but I always say the same thing. He’ll never get to me.” I lowered my eyebrows. There was no way she knew what she was saying now, right? “Earl Connor. You remember that name, and you remember to stay away from him and his good looks, too.” “I’ll do that,” I whispered.
“How is Candy doing, by the way?”
I sighed. The noise stirred up one of the cats on the armrests. It turned to stare at me and flicked its tail in annoyance. “She’s fine.” The words came out just as annoyed as I had imagined the cat was sitting next to me.
“Everyone thinks of a kid in a different way, you know?” Lainey continued. I realized it probably had been some time since her last human interaction or conversation. “I didn’t give birth to him, but he’s my son. You can put your nose up to me all you want. You think adopting a little boy who has no one is still not right. It’s just not right to you people, but I don’t care what you say.”
“Lainey, I didn’t say anything …”
“You come in here with your snobby attitude and your good clothes.”
I looked down at myself. Good clothes? Anything would be considered good compared to living in your own filth.
Lainey stood up just then. She shook her finger toward me. “At least I didn’t pretend like all of you!”
I started to panic. She was getting upset. What could she be capable of? I wasn’t sure. Her mood and affect were so unstable. I stood up too, not sure if I should make a run toward the front door or not. My eyes shifted toward it, to the door knob, on how to maneuver it in a hurry if the need may suddenly arise.
“No, all of you are fake!” she cried out. “When they adopted you, it was the same thing, but they made me feel bad about it and they just pretended that you were theirs, but you ain’t never belonged to them and you know it, don’t you?”
I gasped in horror. Now she was trying to accuse me of being adopted? She was truly crazy. “I can see it in your eyes!” she went on shouting and still shaking and pointing her index finger at me, taking a few steps closer. “You’ve always known! They’re convincing, I know. They tried to convince me, too!” She stepped even closer still, too close for comfort.
Suddenly I ducked underneath her arm and sprinted toward the front door. My hand quickly twisted the door knob and I swung it open and looked back at Lainey, a wild look in her eyes. She remained positioned as before, still pointing to where I had just been standing. She turned her head then and our eyes met once again.
“You’d better be careful. Earl Connor might be lurking in the shadows out there.” She grinned. I stepped out onto the porch and slammed the front door behind me. I hesitantly looked around. Nothing but the falling down shed and a ground full of snow. I carefully walked on the rotten floorboards of the porch and was so glad when I was finally back in the safety of my own car again. I started it up and sped away from Lainey Tritt as fast as I could.
She had genuinely freaked me out. I never wanted to step foot in that place again. It made me feel stranger still to know that Emry had grown up there in that creepy place. Perhaps it wasn’t always so creepy? Who knows. I kept getting flashes of imagines of Lainey’s husband hanging from a hook dead in that shed. No wonder no one ever kept it up. Stupid, I told myself. That story isn’t even true. She’s just a woman without a properly functioning mind anymore. I should be feeling more sorry for her than I was. She was living there in that filthy house in her own delirious world. The thought of another world sparked up the memory of Evadere. How I longed to be there right now where I had felt safe and perfectly at ease for once.
The houses blurred past me as I sped down the road, barely even conscious of my driving. Why would such a thing come from Lainey’s mouth about my being adopted? It couldn’t be true. I felt the tears come on quickly, and I angrily wiped them away with the back of my hand. I couldn’t sit here and allow myself to get upset over something I knew wasn’t true. My baby pictures were plastered all over the house. There hadn’t ever been even the slightest mention of it to me before by anyone. Surely someone would’ve slipped it to me if it were true. That’s because it’s not true, I convinced myself and slowed down my driving speed as I began to calm down a little, but a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach lingered. It was that small portion of doubt that I knew nothing about everything, that I had been blinded for most of my life and that nothing I knew was of any sort of truth, that everything around me was only as my parents wanted me to see it. I had to find out for myself. I had to look my mother straight in the eyes and find out what exactly the truth was. There was no way around it. If it wasn’t true, she could tell me I was being ridiculous and that would be that. If it was true, then … I shuddered at the mere thought of it. Everything around me would change even more drastically than it already had.
The anxiety I had had before about being around my house and my family didn’t even occur to me now. That ache that Lainey Tritt had put there was still in my stomach, eating away at me piece by piece.
I pulled in front of the house and got out of my car. I didn’t even bother to put on a pair of gloves or hat as the wind whipped around me. I didn’t even seem to notice it as I took long, steady strides up the walk, then up the steps, opening the front door without any sort of hesitation. I shut the door behind me and listened. The TV was on, and Matthew sat in front of it. He grinned and waved to me. I waved back and stomped through the house, my boots still on leaving wet shoe prints behind me.
“Anna, is that you?” I heard my mother ask from the kitchen. I took a few more long steps into the room and leaned against the kitchen table. My mother stood over the counter as she peeled potatoes and tossed them into a pot beside her. “You slept in late this morning, honey. Are you feeling okay?” Then she turned to look at me, and her eyebrows lowered in hesitation. “Anna?” She put down the peeler and potato to spin the entire way around to face me. “What’s the matter?”
“You tell me,” I spit out.
She gave me a questioning look. “What do you mean?”
So my father hadn’t told her about our wonderful adventures at the prison yesterday. Or, maybe he had told her and she decided to act clueless about it. Sometimes she did things like that, ignored circumstances as if they never existed and went about her merry way. No, I decided. He hadn’t told her.
I swallowed down the lump forming in my throat.
“You look pale. Honey, please sit down,” she insisted in a soft voice, reaching out to touch my arm. I jerked away. “I’m fine standing,” I snapped at her.
She gave me a look of uncertainty as if she didn’t recognize the person standing before her. Perhaps she was unrecognizable to me, too. Perhaps this whole family thing was merely a charade. Maybe Lainey Tritt was right. Maybe I didn’t have a real family.
“Am I yours?”
“What?”
I shut my eyes tightly and shook my head as the words escaped out. “Am I adopted?”
The look on her face just then was one of pure horror as it twisted up in a moment of grief as well as deceit. I gasped, my hand extending over my gaping mouth. So Lainey Tritt had
been right all along. No wonder she remembered my family. They stuck out as the other ones who had adopted a child.
“I can’t believe it,” I whispered. It felt as if my legs were going to give out from under me. I caught myself on the edge of the table. The tears were there but barely. It was as if the shock of this moment was even more powerful than the overwhelming urge to cry.
“Anna, please!” My mother grabbed my arm and pulled me away from where Matthew could hear us speak. She peeked in at him as he was still happily watching his show as she led me into my father’s study just off the dining room and shut the door behind us. “Please look at me,” she begged.
My eyes fell to the floor. I couldn’t look at her. I just couldn’t.
“Say something,” she pleaded again.
I shook my head and leaned against the front of my father’s huge cherry desk. My head was still lowered. “You’re unbelievable,” I snapped. “You want me to say something? It seems to me that I’m the one owed an explanation here.”
My mother sighed. You could tell she was trying to gather her thoughts. She always did this. She thought too much before she spoke. It always drove me crazy and even more so now. I had always thought of her as being so honest, one of the best people I had ever met in the way of values and the goodness of the heart, but now all I could think about was that her pausing to say anything meant that she was only stalling to allow herself more time to come up with an even better cover-up lie. She played the part well. Her and my father deserved an academy award.
“No more lies!” I shouted, weary of her lingering silence.
She began to cry. “It’s true,” she cried out. “It’s true.” She covered her face with her hands as she began to sob.
I looked up. Seeing her like that almost made me feel sorry for her again, but no, I would stand my ground and demand nothing but the truth.
“I’m so sorry, Anna.” She continued to wail as she bent downwards toward the carpet. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
“No, you hoped it would never happen at all, that I’d never find out!” She looked up at me, her face soaked in tears. “I never meant to hurt you. I have always felt as if you were truly mine, Anna.”
“The truth,” I insisted again, crossing my arms. I went over and pulled her to a standing position. I looked her straight in the eye so that she would know I meant it. I was so tired of these games.
She gave me an apologetic look again. “I could never have children. Something’s wrong with me.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know if I could feel complete without having children in the house.”
“So Matthew, too?”
She nodded. “Yes.” I tried to think back to the time when I was little and Matthew had come into the house. I would have been around four. I couldn’t remember what it was like before he came or when he came. I had been too little to understand at the time, I supposed. “Why didn’t you tell me? How could you have kept this from me?”
“I thought it was best this way. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
“You’re just sorry you got caught.”
“I know you’re angry. You have every right to be, but please know that I love you, Anna, more than anything, and I have never wanted anything but the best for you and your brother.” She was probably right. I shouldn’t be so furious at her, but I was. This was just too much to bear right now on top of everything else. “It’s hard to find out, but it changes nothing,” my mother continued.
“It changes everything,” I corrected her.
“Please,” she began to beg again. “I love you.”
“It’s like I’m living a nightmare. Maybe I’m not really even here. Is somebody going to pop out and tell me I’m dead next, that I’m really just some spirit wandering around?” “What are you talking about?”
I took a deep breath. I had been rambling. I had to calm myself down and think clearly. “I know it’s a huge shock, but you are still my daughter and I’m your mother.”
“Who are they?”
“What?”
“My real parents?”
“Oh.” She sat down in a large chair stuffed into the corner of the room. She ran her palms over the smooth leather exterior. “I don’t know.”
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“I really don’t know, Anna. You had been abandoned as an infant. Someone had found you and took you to the adoption agency where I then got you shortly after you were born.”
Abandoned. The word rolled around in my head like a heavy log. “So my birthday?” “Well, the doctors were certain that you had only been a few days old when you were found. I guess it may not be completely accurate, but …” she whispered. Unbelievable. I had no real name, no real birthday. I might as well not exist at all. “Anna, you can’t tell Matthew. He’d never understand.”
I glared at her. “I’m not going to tell Matthew,” I said with irritation in my voice. “Hardly anyone knew,” she said. “Please tell me how you found out.”
I hesitated. Should I tell her? It didn’t seem to me that she deserved to know. “Lainey Tritt,” I suddenly blurted out. She removed a tissue from her pocket and began dabbing her nose with it. “Who’s that?” “She’s the woman who adopted Emry Logan.”
My mother’s face twisted up again at the announcement of the name. What did it mean to her if my father hadn’t told her about our little rendezvous yesterday in the prison courtyard?
“What do you know of him?”
“I should ask the same of you.” I stared at her, wondering what my father told her and what he didn’t. It was obvious she knew something.
“Well,” she began hesitantly again. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I guess I will anyway.”
I tapped my foot impatiently.
“A group of townspeople in Seneca have gathered together against him. He’s dangerous, a man to stay away from,” she said.
“Dangerous how?” She eyed me as if still trying to figure out how I knew of him. “A threat to society. A killer. He …” she hesitated but then looked at my face and knew she had to spill everything she knew now. It was the only way to regain what little trust I had of her. “There’s something different about him. He has this special gift. Well, I shouldn’t even call it a gift. He’s into black magic, Anna. He worships Satan.”
I almost laughed aloud, but I quickly removed the smirk from my face. “How do you know this? Does he go around wearing all black and have horns growing out of his head?”
She frowned at my sarcasm. “Anna, you have to believe me.”
A sound similar to a snort escaped from my throat. “Of course you have every right not to, but about this, I am telling you the truth. Your father has told me things about him. He isn’t someone to take lightly. Please tell me that you’re having nothing to do with him and his kind. Mrs. Anderson knows things.”
His kind. How very ironic. Emry didn’t even know who his kind was. My father thought he was a devil worshipper. Now it was starting to make sense. He would feel it his duty to rid the town of such an evil, and so they had formed a group of people to seek him out and take him down, to lock him up so he wouldn’t be able to get anyone else involved with his witchery. I was assuming that the only thing that Mrs. Anderson knew was what Buck had told her about his ability to move things, things such as Buck.
I took a deep breath and looked at the woman I had always assumed was my birth mother. She had always seemed fragile, yet had this strength about her, a way with people that could calm them down and get them to trust what she said, but now that image was completely destroyed. She only looked fragile, sad, pathetic. I almost wanted to shake her and ask how she got this way, but then I really should be shaking myself and asking the question of why hadn’t I ever figured this out before? Why had nothing seemed out of place as far as my belonging until today?
“So Mrs. Anderson knows things you said. What do you mean? Like if she knows things, doesn’t that make her a witch, which technic
ally would put her into the category of her practicing black magic also?” I crossed my arms and raised my eyebrows at her.
She began chewing on her nails nervously. “Mrs. Anderson is … different herself, but not in that way. She can be trusted. She knows what she’s talking about. She’s helped gather a group of strong men in the community who can also be trusted and who will help rid Seneca of any black magic and send out the message to anyone who might be like Emry Logan, that we don’t tolerate such practices here. We’re a God-fearing community. They’re actually meeting again tonight. All of them.”
“The witch hunting the devil. Interesting.” I couldn’t hide the smirk this time. What she was saying was all too ridiculous. Of course, they probably weren’t to blame for their lack of understanding of what was really going on with Emry. Worshipping Satan was the only kind of logic they would pin on him for what had happened that night with Buck.
“I really shouldn’t be telling you this,” my mother blurted out, pacing back and forth in front of the chair. “I just don’t get how you can trust anything he says.”
“Who?”
“Father.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, as if you haven’t recognized it.”
She gave me another puzzling glance. “I really don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, come on!” I shouted out. “The affair. Why do you even make me have to say it? You have to already know.”
She became very still and very quiet, more tears streaming down her face as she stood there and stared at me. “He’s not having an affair,” she whispered.
“Of course he is! I saw him with her. He tells you he’s going over there to talk about what? Satanic people in Seneca? Don’t you think they’ve spent a little too much time together alone?” Her eyes moved to the floor and she crossed her hands in front of her and clasped them together. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“No, of course not,” I snapped. “I never do. I don’t know anything. Everyone treats me like a child, a child that’s not even theirs to begin with.”
Strange in Skin Page 18