Judith didn’t know about the affair and Michael’s other baby. Not yet.
John Dawson resumed his life with Barbara and the two girls, one his and one not, on condition that they move away from Minneapolis. Distraught over the hopelessness of her relationship with Michael, Barbara agreed. When she was alone with John and the girls in a new place, no work to occupy her, she became more depressed, less attentive to her children. And to her husband. The voices in my memory, the shouts, the sobbed pleas, were a legacy of their unhappiness.
I could only guess how Judith had learned about Barbara and the baby. Perhaps Barbara was unable to stay away from the man she still loved, perhaps she called him—or wrote to him.
Through all the following years, Judith had kept this single sheet of note paper, the message it bore disguised and made unintelligible to anyone who didn’t know the story behind it.
I want you to know that I have no regrets. I could lie and say I’m sorry it happened because it turned my life upside down, but I’m not sorry. It was wonderful, and it gave me the one beautiful thing I’ve got left.
Mother’s own note was still paper-clipped to it: Explore the motivations of a woman who is capable of such a thing.
She might have found the letter in his belongings after his death, but I had a feeling she’d found it before.
I picked up the story about the accident that killed Michael and his daughter Michelle. Witnesses said the Goddard car was moving erratically and might have been speeding before it crossed into the oncoming traffic lane.
An argument in the car? Judith unable to contain her fury at his betrayal? Michael unable to keep control of the car as he tried to defend himself, explain himself?
What had those last moments been like for the little girl, Michelle? Had she heard her parents screaming at each other, her mother raking the air with bitter accusations?
I held the paper under the bedside lamp and studied the child’s smiling face, so like my sister’s, and considered our entangled lives. This girl and my sister shared a father, a young man who’d been too attractive and charming for anyone’s good. The girl and I shared a sister. But the lost child had no blood kinship with me.
What followed the accident? Judith knew Barbara had a living child fathered by Michael. That knowledge ignited a smoldering desire for revenge.
For the first time I willingly remembered the night Mother died. I closed my eyes, saw her tormented face, heard the ragged voice, the words tumbling out, words that made sense to me now. That woman had no right to her! She had no right to have her child when mine was dead.
After recovering from her injuries, Judith had driven to St. Cloud, found the Dawsons without revealing herself. Perhaps she watched us many times, always focusing on my sister. How it must have wounded her to see a little girl so much like her own, with the same glowing blond hair, the blue eyes of Michael Goddard. Alive. All her years stretching out ahead. For an instant all I felt was pity for Judith Goddard in her grief.
I remembered that last day on the playground. Thunder rumbled across the sky. Mothers hustled their children away. A woman with a long dark ponytail who had a little boy by the hand said she was sure our mom would be back in a minute.
And I, being strong and brave for my little sister, said yes, we’d be all right, Mommy would be here to get us.
Then we were alone and the storm broke, sudden and ferocious. My sister clung to me and screamed. Mommy! Where’s Mommy? I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, while we stood in the deserted playground with the rain streaming over us and the trees thrashing above.
A woman with an umbrella appeared out of nowhere. “Your mother sent me, come on, get out of the rain!”
To my child’s mind, the word mother was all that mattered. I didn’t know who this woman was, but our mother had sent her, and she sheltered us with her big umbrella, protected us from the terrifying storm.
The inside of her car smelled of new leather.
When had I started to feel afraid? The woman told us she’d promised to take care of us for a while because our mother had something important to do. She stopped somewhere and bought chocolate milkshakes for us, and we drank silently, greedily. Our parents never let us have anything sugary.
Sitting in the motel outside St. Cloud, I could taste the rich sweetness of my milkshake and feel the cold liquid spilling from the straw onto my tongue. I didn’t know how much time had passed before I’d awakened in a house where stacks of big brown boxes lined the walls.
I remembered my own confusion and alarm and my sister’s happy acceptance of the stranger’s attention. I couldn’t recall the trip east, the first weeks or months in our new home. Vivid, coherent memories didn’t begin until well after that, in the second or third year of school. I was Rachel Goddard then. My sister’s name was Michelle. Judith Goddard was my mother.
She must have sedated me in the beginning, and she must have hypnotized me repeatedly to muddy my memories. I was a child, and my world had vanished. I believed what I could see and touch. I answered to the name I was called.
Yet somehow I’d clung to scraps of my other life. My memories were amorphous, and I doubted my own mind, telling myself I had an overactive imagination. But I held onto my real self by inventing Kathy. My imaginary friend was me, Cathy, Catherine, kept alive in the only way I could do it.
My sister hungered for the kind of attention Judith gave her. She’d needed little persuasion to become Mother’s adored child. Her memories of our real parents probably faded rapidly, with some assistance from hypnosis.
I was the troublesome one, haunted all my life by faces and voices and images that made no sense to me, and always feeling left out of the love between Mother and my sister. Stephanie Dawson was the one Mother wanted, the one she could make into another Michelle Goddard. I was an innocent bystander, caught up in it all.
How could she have believed she’d never be found out? Had there come a time, after grief’s sharp edges dulled and she was rational again, when she’d looked at what she’d done and known she would be discovered someday? Everything depended on her control of my memories and curiosity. For twenty-one years it had worked. I could only imagine her desperation when she realized I was breaking free of her.
I rubbed the back of my neck, stiff and painful with tension, and rose to pace between the bed and desk. Under my bare feet the short green carpet felt rough and unyielding. The room smelled of lemon polish, as our house always had after Rosario’s energetic attacks on the furniture.
Mother had given us a good life, in so many ways. We’d been cared for, catered to, encouraged, supported. We were the center of her existence. No professional duty was more important than our piano recitals, class plays, parent-teacher conferences. She took us everywhere from art galleries to amusement parks. She had no private life that didn’t include us.
But she wasn’t our mother. She abducted us from a playground and took us halfway across the country and twisted our minds and lied to us and cut us off from our family. Her actions had led directly to my real father’s suicide. She might have played a part in the deaths of her own husband and child, months before the abduction. In the end her crime had driven her to turn a knife on me, and then herself.
So much loss, such a horrifying waste. I wished I could hate her, with a sharp cleansing wrath. I wished I could crush the pity I felt for this woman who tried to fill her empty heart and life with her husband’s other child.
***
I called Luke and talked for an hour, telling him everything I’d learned and put together.
“What now?” he asked when I finished.
“I’m going to see her.”
“Oh, God, Rachel, I hate the thought of you going through this alone. Why don’t I fly out? Tomorrow’s Saturday, I don’t have to worry about appointments—”
“No, don’t. I need to do this by myself.” But I had to smile at his protectiveness. “Thanks for wanting to help, but I’ll be fine.”
“Promise you’ll come back to me soon?”
“I’ll come back to you soon.”
“I love you,” he said. “Whoever you are.”
I laughed, even though tears had sprung to my eyes. “I love you too,” I said for the first time, and meant it.
***
I wouldn’t think about how I was going to tell her who I was. I wouldn’t think about my sister’s part in this, or about our other sister and brother, our grandparents and aunts and uncles, a whole large family that I sensed lurking in the background of my memory. All I cared about now was seeing the woman who had given birth to me.
My fingers shook as I put through the call to the number Steckling had given me. A woman’s husky voice answered on the second ring, and I was momentarily unable to speak.
“Hello?” she said again.
Somehow I got the words out. “May I speak to Barbara Olsson, please?”
“Speaking.”
“This—” I cleared my throat. “My name is Rachel Campbell—”
“Oh, right.” Her voice lifted, became warm and friendly. “Jack Steckling called and said you’d be getting in touch. I’d be glad to talk to you. When do you want to come over?”
My throat threatened to close off speech. The voice that came out sounded high and very young, not like my own. “Tomorrow morning? Around eleven? Would that be okay?”
“Sure. Fine. I’ll give you directions. Got a pencil and paper?”
A minute later I put down the receiver, leaned my face into my hands and let the tears come.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I thought I wouldn’t sleep, but I did, heavily and blessedly free of dreams. When I woke to the buzz of my travel alarm, I didn’t know at first where I was. I lay staring at the sliver of dawn between the curtains, remembering.
Today I would see my real mother for the first time in twenty-one years.
***
I had two houses to find when I got to Minneapolis. The first was in a neighborhood where homes were far enough apart to allow privacy, and each had an attached garage and a large lawn. Mature oaks and maples, already changing into their gaudy fall costumes, lined the broad streets with orange, gold and green. The house that had belonged to Michael and Judith Goddard at the time of his death was white with dark blue roof shingles, colonial blue front door and shutters.
It looked familiar only because I’d seen it in the photos hidden in Mother’s study. I doubted I’d ever had a fully conscious look at the exterior during the time—how long? a day or two at the most?—before Judith took us east.
I remembered being wrapped in a big soft robe, and seeing stacks of boxes, little else.
The door opened and a middle-aged man in tee shirt and chinos ambled out, yawning and rubbing at his unshaven face, to pluck the rolled newspaper from the driveway. He glanced at me where I’d stopped in the middle of the quiet street. I drove on. It was Saturday, and all along the block papers still lay on driveways and lawns, draperies were still drawn against the morning sun.
Barbara Dawson, now Barbara Olsson, lived several miles away, in a smaller two-story house with faded green shutters. Mounds of marigolds and blue petunias bloomed profusely in flower beds skirting the foundation shrubs.
An old blue car and a red mini-van sat on the asphalt driveway. Who else was at home? Oh, God, would I have to encounter the whole family?
I parked across the street and sat taking deep breaths. My heart would not slow down. It was almost eleven, the time we’d agreed on, but I couldn’t make myself get out and walk across the street. And I couldn’t drive away. Paralyzed by indecision, I sat watching the house.
After a few minutes a boy drove up the street in a battered green car, pulled to a stop in front of the house and tooted his horn. In response the front door opened and a teenage girl bounded out, long red hair swinging around her face and shimmering in the sun. She wore jeans and a yellow sweatshirt, and had a big blue canvas bag slung over one shoulder.
Caroline? My other sister.
She turned and looked back at the door, throwing up her arms in a gesture that could only mean impatience.
I shifted my gaze to the doorway, and gasped as a shock went through me. For a moment I thought I was seeing Mother, Judith, standing there. The woman, wearing black slacks and a blue blouse, was tall and slender. Straight auburn hair fell to her shoulders. She looked like Judith. And she looked like me.
She would recognize me. She would see my face and know me in an instant. Any choices I had would vanish as everything spun out of control. I gripped the steering wheel with one hand, fumbling the keys back into the ignition with the other.
Then I let my hands drop. Of course she wouldn’t recognize me. She wouldn’t know anything unless I told her. I’d come this far. I couldn’t leave now.
She talked to her teenage daughter, using the same gesture the girl had, hands flung out, palms up, fingers splayed. Something made the girl laugh, run to the door and plant a quick kiss on her mother’s cheek.
I watched them, spellbound. Barbara Dawson Olsson smiled at her daughter, waved to her retreating back. My attention turned to the girl again. I tried to absorb every detail of her appearance and demeanor as she moved to the car with a bouncy step, flung open the passenger door, jumped into the seat beside the boy and greeted him with a flash of a grin. A happy girl, filled with the simple joy of being alive on a bright September morning.
What would she think of me, a dead half-sister suddenly claiming a place in her life?
After the girl and boy drove away, I looked back at the house and saw Barbara still in the doorway, watching me. Over the distance, our eyes met.
Now. It was time, whether I was ready or not. Fighting down panic, I opened the car door and stepped out. She expected a stranger. I would be that stranger. I would play the part until I knew enough to make a decision.
As I crossed the street, my bag slung over my shoulder just as Caroline had carried hers, Barbara came forward onto the lawn. She was smiling.
“Are you Rachel?” she asked in the husky voice I’d heard on the phone last night. She offered a hand.
“Yes, I’m Rachel Campbell.” My voice rose a note higher than normal. “Thank you for letting me come.”
I reached out and touched my mother, slipped my hand into hers, felt a gentle warm pressure before she broke the contact. A wash of regret made me realize I’d expected to feel an immediate connection. But she was just a middle-aged woman, no one I knew.
Up close I could never have mistaken her for Judith. Her face, beginning its surrender to the downward tug of age, was fuller, without Judith’s high cheekbones, and her eyes were a clear blue. But there were striking similarities between the two women’s coloring and lithe figures. Obviously Michael Goddard had liked this type.
A shadow suddenly dimmed her eyes, and I felt the clutch of alarm. She does recognize me. Then she brightened again and widened her smile.
“Another redhead,” she said. “Did you see my daughter leaving just now? Red hair runs in our family. My grandfather, my father, my brothers and me.”
I could only smile and nod. In my mind rose a vague image of a man with red hair who hoisted both my sister and me onto his knees, so that our feet dangled together. Our grandfather, an uncle?
Thrown off-balance by this slice of memory, I barely heard Barbara’s remarks about the beautiful autumn weather, the warm sunshine. I followed her up two broad concrete steps, across a black rubber welcome mat, and into the house.
“Have a seat,” she said. “I just made a fresh pot of coffee for us. I’ll be right back.”
She vanished through a doorway, leaving me in a living room with periwinkle blue walls and carpet. The fireplace, its mantel painted white to match the rest of the woodwork, was the focal point, with the flowered chintz sofa and chairs angled in front of it. A pleasant but bland space, utterly lacking the individuality and elegance of Judith’s living room.
I shook
my head. Don’t think about Mother.
Listening, I tried to determine whether anyone else was in the house. The only sounds I heard were faint clinks, no doubt Barbara gathering things in the kitchen. We were probably alone, thank God.
I studied the framed photographs that crowded the mantel. Caroline with a flute in her hands. A blond boy who must be Mark, my half-brother, holding a soccer ball and wearing a tee shirt with Little Devils printed on it. In other pictures they posed in dress-up clothes, or romped in deep snow with a mixed breed dog that resembled an Irish setter. At the end of the row of photos sat a large one of Barbara herself with a blond man, arm in arm, smiling.
This was her second life. Where in these captured moments of family happiness did Michelle and I belong?
I was startled by Barbara’s sudden presence at my side, a touch on my elbow and a drift of floral perfume.
“That’s my husband Mark with me,” she said, nodding at the photo. “On our last anniversary. And that’s Mark Junior.” She gestured at the boy with the soccer ball. “I’d introduce you, but they’re both off fishing with some of my husband’s buddies. That’s our daughter Caroline, you saw her.”
My smile felt stiff. “You have a beautiful family.”
“Oh, don’t I?” she said, laughing with pleasure. “I’m so blessed. I thank God every day.”
A cold fear traveled down my spine and lodged in the pit of my stomach, a dread of revealing myself and seeing not joy but consternation in my mother’s face.
Maintaining an outward calm that had nothing to do with what I felt, I sat on the sofa as she indicated. She settled into a chair across from me. On the table between us she’d placed a painted wooden tray with a glass coffee pot and two mugs.
“Cream and sugar?” She lifted the coffee pot, filled a mug. “Just black?” She handed me the cup. “Tell me about this paper you’re writing.”
Avoiding her eyes, I gave her my rehearsed story.
She nodded and asked several questions. Like Steckling, she kept glancing at my scarred hand but didn’t mention it.
The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 26