by Anne Stuart
How had Lou died? Was it in a train wreck? What had once been an unimportant detail now loomed very large indeed. If Lou Abbott died in a train, then Susan Abbott had every intention of driving a car wherever she went.
Hattie was watching her closely, her brown eyes suspicious. “What can I get you for breakfast, Miss Lou?”
“I’m not really hungry.”
“Gotta keep your strength up. You got a busy day today. Let me make you some scrambled eggs and toast.”
Susan shuddered. “Thanks, Hattie, but I don’t think I could manage to choke it down. Maybe just some strawberry yogurt if we have some?”
“Yogurt? What’s that?”
Good God, they didn’t even have yogurt in 1949! There was no reasonable answer she could come up with. “How about cornflakes?” she guessed. Surely they had cornflakes back then.
“Miss Tallulah, you’ve always hated cereal. You know milk gives you gas. What is going on with you, child?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said truthfully. “I really don’t know.” Hattie was watching her with both doubt and wisdom in her eyes, and for a brief moment Susan was tempted to tell her the truth. Maybe Hattie would tell Lou’s parents, and they’d lock her up in an insane asylum, but at least she wouldn’t marry the wrong man. And at least she wouldn’t die in a train wreck.
However, she might spend her days in a straitjacket, assuming they had such things, which wasn’t much of an alternative. But then, Hattie didn’t look like the type to rat on her.
“I need...” she began, when the doorbell rang.
“You just wait right here, Miss Lou. I’ll get rid of whoever it is, and you can tell me all about it.”
But Susan had already chickened out. “That’s all right,” she said brightly. “You’re in the midst of something. I’ll get the door.” And she slipped out of the kitchen before she could change her mind.
The Abbott house was large and rambling, and she hadn’t yet discovered where the front door was, so by the time she found it, whoever was waiting had stopped ringing the bell and had begun pounding on the door.
She yanked the door open, not surprised to be confronted by Neddie Marsden in a towering rage. “Stop making such a racket,” she said calmly. “You’ll wake the entire family.”
He didn’t move. He stood in the doorway, staring at her, his handsome face slack-jawed with shock, though she couldn’t figure out why.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
Susan had never responded particularly well to men having temper tantrums, and she wasn’t going to let a petty tyrant like Neddie Marsden browbeat her. “Go away, Neddie,” she said wearily. “I’m not in the mood for this so early in the morning....”
He caught her arm in a painful grip, pushing her into the house, and kicked the door shut behind him. He slammed her against the wall, pressing his bulk against her, and his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her upper arm. His nostrils were flaring and veins stood out in his temples.
“What’s going on with you?” he demanded in a furious whisper. “What the hell do you think you’re wearing? You look like a damned tomboy! You get your fanny upstairs and put on a dress, fix your hair and your makeup, and then you come back down and behave yourself.”
She glared up at him, uncowed. “I’ll dress any way I please. No one’s coming over for hours, you weren’t supposed to be here, and I have every right—”
He caught her other arm, as well, and shook her, hard enough that her head slammed against the wall behind her. “You have no rights. You’re going to be my wife, and I expect you to behave like a lady at all times. I won’t have you shaming me, Tallulah. I thought you were past all that wildness. I thought you’d grown up.”
“What if I don’t want to grow up?” She was proud of how even her tone of voice was. She didn’t want to admit it, but pompous old Neddie Marsden was scaring her. Maybe because right now he wasn’t old at all, he was young and strong and mean.
“You don’t have the choice.”
“What if I don’t want to marry you?”
The expression on his face was absolutely terrifying. Her arms were numb beneath his punishing grip, and she couldn’t move, she could only stand there, frozen.
“You’re marrying me all right, Tallulah,” he said in an icy voice. “You have no choice in the matter, I thought that was understood. I’d hate to have to threaten you...”
“You already are.” She glared up at him, but her voice wavered.
“We’ve been through all this. Look on it as a simple business agreement. I get the wife and hostess I need, a blue-blooded Abbott to assure my place in society. In return, your father’s estate is secure, and he doesn’t have to worry about prosecution for war profiteering.”
“You were the war profiteer, not my father,” she shot back, remembering Jack’s words.
“Hell, Tallulah, we both were. There’s a lot of money to be made during wars, and we were smart enough to make it. Who do you think pays for those pretty dresses you hate wearing, for your new car, for this lavish wedding? Not even the Abbotts could survive the depression with their fortunes intact, though your father put up a good front. But he needed me. And in return, I get you.”
“And what do I get out of the deal?” she demanded bitterly.
“I don’t think anyone really cares,” Neddie said softly. “You’ll have an extravagant life-style and the respect due my wife, but those things never mattered to you, did they?”
“No,” she said. “They never did.”
“And then there’s your little sister. You wouldn’t want to see her shamed, now would you? If your father was disgraced, her life would be ruined, and she wouldn’t even have the cushion of money to help her. But we don’t have to worry about that, now, do we? You’re going to marry me, and you know it. No more disrespectful behavior, no more inappropriate clothing. And no more Jack McGowan.” The fingers on her arms tightened still further, and she couldn’t control her little cry of pain. “I don’t want him sniffing around you. I might have to do something about it, and you wouldn’t want to get me angry, now would you, Tallulah?”
I’m not Tallulah, she wanted to cry, but she didn’t. “You’re hurting me.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’ll leave bruises. Do you want the wedding guests to know that you hurt me? And that you enjoy it?”
He considered it for a moment, savoring the notion, and Susan’s blood went cold. In a moment of blinding clarity she thought she knew how Tallulah had died, and it wasn’t in a train wreck. It had been at the brutal hands of Edward Marsden.
He released her then, and she fell back against the wall, strangely weak. “Go change, Tallulah,” he said in his mellifluous voice. “Fix your hair, put on some makeup. Take your time. I expect you to be a credit to me, and I’m prepared to wait.”
She stared at him. He was a big man, though not much taller than Tallulah’s impressive height. He had cold, piggy eyes and a cruel smile, and she realized with a start that he wasn’t that old. Probably not even thirty, and yet old in the harsh ways of the world.
She pushed away from the wall, and he stepped back, smugly sure he had her beaten. “You’ll have a long wait,” she said.
“I’m patient,” he said. “And I always win.”
She believed him. She remembered the ancient Ned Marsden with his cowed second wife and his milky eyes, still radiating power even in his late seventies. It wouldn’t do to underestimate him.
She turned to leave him, and his voice followed her. “I’m counting on you, Tallulah. You wouldn’t want to see me lose my temper.”
He was right about that much. He could lose his temper all he wanted, once she was out of reach. She said nothing, feeling his cold eyes on her back as she mounted the stairs, only to have Lou’s father almost barrel into her in his anxiety to get down.
“What have you done?” he demanded in a furious whisper. “You haven’t made him angry, have
you?”
She looked at the man who raised her mother. He was a frightened, selfish little man, ready to sacrifice his own daughter to keep himself safe.
She didn’t bother to disguise the contempt in her face. “I’m sure you’ll fix everything.” She moved past him, her back straight.
His voice followed her. “For God’s sake, change those awful clothes! You’ll ruin everything.”
She was shaking by the time she got back in her bedroom, shaking so hard she collapsed on the tufted slipper chair. Outside the sun was shining, inside she was still desperately cold. She wrapped her arms around her body, rocking back and forth. There had to be some way out of this mess. Without sacrificing her sister. Mother. Whatever.
God, she felt like something out of Chinatown. The thought should have amused her, but right now her sense of humor seemed to have vanished. She felt trapped, smothered, with no way out. Even Jack McGowan, for all his dire warnings, hadn’t offered any possibility of escape.
There had to be a way out There was a reason she was here, or at least was dreaming she was here, and it couldn’t be to repeat history. That much was absolutely certain.
She looked at her reflection in the hinged mirror over the kidney-shaped dressing table. Tallulah Abbott was pale, her dark brown eyes haunted, her full, unpainted mouth faintly tremulous. She bit her lip, favoring the stranger in the mirror with her steeliest expression, and was pleased to see that Lou Abbott could look surprisingly stern despite her lush beauty.
She could see the faint bloodstain Jack had told her about, and she touched it. Putting on that shirt had felt like sliding into a warm embrace, and now she knew why. Tallulah had obviously cherished that shirt, and it might simply be because it was loose and comfortable, unlike the rest of her fussy and tailored clothes.
But Susan didn’t think so. Lou treasured it because it had belonged to Jack McGowan. He’d taken the shirt off his back and wrapped her in it, long ago, and somewhere in this stranger’s body she could still remember how wonderful it felt.
But Jack wasn’t the answer. He didn’t want her, he’d never wanted her. She was like a kid sister, his brother’s girl, someone he kissed for God-only-knew-what reason, but not someone he wanted. He was leaving, and he was leaving her behind.
She stripped off the shirt and threw it in the frilly wastebasket. She could already see fresh marks on her skin where Neddie had bruised her, and she shivered again. She wasn’t going to submit tamely to their plans for her. And she found it equally hard to believe that Tallulah had submitted.
Susan hadn’t the faintest idea how she was supposed to arrange her hair, what kind of makeup she was supposed to wear. All the lipsticks were bright, intense colors, and the mascara came in a tiny little compact with a separate brush. She could tell that Lou’s eyebrows had been carefully plucked, and her hair was dark enough that she shouldn’t need to use eyebrow pencil. Not unless she was supposed to look like Joan Crawford, and with any luck 1949 was too late for the skinny eyebrow look. She was forced to succumb to the girdle again—as far as she could tell there was no other way to hold up the seamed stockings. She was standing inside the closet door, staring at the possibilities, when she smelled the fresh cigarette smoke. She jumped back, startled, to face Elda.
Her mother’s stepmother looked like the very picture of a jaded woman, from her bloodred fingernails to the cigarette drooping from her coral lips. If Elda was anything to go by, the Joan Crawford Mommie Dearest style was still alive and kicking.
“I hear you upset Neddie this morning,” she said, moving into the bedroom and closing the door behind her. “I thought you were smarter than that. Neddie’s easy enough to handle if you know how. You can’t threaten him or push him. He likes sweet, fluttery little girls who hang on his every word. That’s your role, darling. I thought you knew how to play it.”
Susan didn’t move, keeping her expression blank as she listened for clues. What was up between the two of them?
“I don’t want to marry him,” she said flatly.
Elda’s smile was faint and unsurprised. “Of course you don’t. You’ve already told us that. And we’ve told you that you don’t have a choice. He’ll ruin us if you don’t.”
“This is like some bad Hollywood movie.”
“You should know, sweetie. You’ve always been addicted to them, like some shopgirl from the five-and-dime. People like the Abbotts don’t go rushing to matinees, they don’t marry for love, they don’t disobey their parents or their husbands. They know what’s expected of them in this life.”
“And what’s expected of me?”
“You don’t need me to remind you, Lou. You know perfectly well that without Neddie’s support your father will lose everything. This house, what little money we have left, the respect of the community. He’d probably kill himself if any of his little dabblings were made public. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, now would you?”
Susan had never before looked in the face of pure evil, and the effect was disturbing. Elda blew a perfect smoke ring, and her coral lips curved in a catlike smile. “Of course you wouldn’t.” She answered the question for herself. “Are you afraid of sex, sweetie? I gather you kept yourself charmingly pure for your long-lost soldier boy, and I know that no one’s been around since, except for Jack McGowan, and you haven’t had the chance to let him under your skirts. I can’t really set your mind at ease about Neddie. He’s quite a demanding lover, and probably not wellsuited for a virgin. By the time you’re experienced enough to enjoy him, he’ll probably lose interest, but then, no one has any right to expect a happy ending, do they?” She crossed the room and stubbed out her cigarette on the glass-topped dressing table. “Let me give you a little hint. Some motherly advice on the eve of your wedding. If you’re sweet and shy and demure and do everything he orders you to do he probably won’t hurt you as much as he would if you fight him. But if you fight back, make him force you, it will excite him so much he’ll finish even more quickly. It’s up to you, my pet. If you want the pain and humiliation over quickly or if you’re willing to endure for the chance of it not hurting quite so much.”
Susan stared at her, aghast. “You sound like something out of a Victorian novel,” she said. “Sex isn’t humiliating and painful.”
Elda smiled. “It is with Neddie. Quite enjoyably so. I speak from experience.”
Susan stared at her in stricken horror, but Elda ignored her, pushing her out of the way to rifle through her closet. She pulled out a fluttery peachflowered dress and shoved it at her. “Put this one on, dear, and fix your makeup. You look like a ghost. The wedding party is starting to arrive, Cousin Doug is already loaded, and Ginny is too busy with that little brat of hers to keep him away from the bar. You’d think she’d know better than to bring a baby to a wedding rehearsal, but she never had much sense.”
Susan caught the dress in her arms, still unable to say a word. “And smile, damn it,” Elda hissed, all her false affability vanishing. “Look like you’re divinely happy and desperately in love. Just pretend you’re marrying Jack.”
That roused her. “Jack?” Tallulah’s husky voice sounded almost raw coming from her throat.
“You think I don’t know? You’ve had a crush on that man as long as I’ve known you. You only got engaged to Jimmy because you accepted the fact that you couldn’t have him, and then my, oh, my, didn’t you feel guilty when Jimmy died? You still can’t have Jack, and you still want him. So just look up at Neddie and pretend he’s Jack. It might even work in bed, at least for a while, though their styles are completely different.”
“You slept with Jack?” Susan demanded, horrified.
“A long, long time ago, precious. And very guilty he was about it. He didn’t realize I wasn’t about to let him say no. He’s good, I have to admit. But not nearly as willing to play my little games as Neddie is.” She leaned over and gave Susan a cool, dry kiss on her cheek. “Too bad you’ll never have a chance to compare them, darling.”
“‘And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson,”’ Susan muttered underneath her breath.
“The strong flourish, darling. The weak fade away, which will be your fate, I’m afraid. At least you can cherish your martyrdom, knowing that you did it all for your darling little sister. And she’ll never have the faintest idea you weren’t a divinely happy bride, will she?”
Perhaps Tallulah accepted her fate. But Elda didn’t know she was dealing with a nineties woman. She met Elda’s supercilious smirk with a faint smile of her own. “I’ll be down as soon as I’m dressed.”
For a moment Elda’s complacency faded. “You are going to be sensible, aren’t you?”
Susan turned away, unwilling to let her see her expression. “How well do you know me, Elda?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re going to get. If you expect me to come down in time for the rehearsal you’d be smart to leave me alone. I’ve had quite enough upset for one morning.”
“Poor little bride,” Elda laughed, her equanimity restored. “I’ll go down and entertain the men for you. But don’t keep them waiting too long. You know about Neddie’s temper.” She touched the bruising on Susan’s arms.
The door closed behind her, leaving Susan standing in the middle of the room, trembling with anger. “I know Neddie’s temper,” she murmured. “But you don’t know Susan Abbott.”
And she moved back to the dressing table, rejecting the pastel pink lipstick and colored her mouth a bright, wicked red. War paint, she thought. Ready for battle.
Chapter Eleven
The wedding rehearsal was an absolute nightmare. St. Anne’s Episcopal Church hadn’t changed in fifty years, and for the first time Susan found herself in familiar territory. It was both comforting and eerie, and she would have liked nothing more than to slip into one of the wooden pews for a few solitary minutes and see if she could find the answers in what was certainly a logical place to look for them.