by Brat
“How do I know I can trust you?” Fiske demanded.
“On the life of Betty Cassidy, my one true love, you have my word,” Manderley replied.
“Fine,” said Fiske. “Bring us down.”
Matilda took the phone. “Hold on, Rhyme!” she said, as the wheel sprang to life. The way down was a lot less scary than the way up. The whole time, Rhyme kept her eyes on Conrad, who stayed in his seat while Fiske stood menacingly overhead. As they tilted closer to solid ground, Rhyme saw that a crowd had gathered beneath the Ferris wheel. No doubt, the visitors had heard Matilda and Fiske over the speakers and came to watch what happened. Ms. Sharpe was going to be so mad! But for now, Rhyme just needed to get back on her feet—and make sure nothing happened to Conrad. She was on a level now with the tents. Twangy music was being piped through the speakers, and excited chatter from the grounds filtered upwards. Billy and Holly came into view, pointing up at her.
Ten seconds later, Rhyme was being pulled out of her car by the elderly operator, Junior, and the security guard—he really looked like a Marvin! They all kept asking Rhyme if she was all right, if anything was broken. “Hurry, this way,” said Junior, throwing a Millwood blanket over her shoulders. “You’ll be safe now.” Rhyme looked up to see Matilda at the railing. Behind her, Meg stood beside Silas Manderley. Two pairs of green eyes. She was about to greet them when everyone looked up at once, in horror. Rhyme turned. Fiske, she saw, had jumped off the ledge of his car and into the darkness behind the Ferris wheel. “Argh!” she heard him scream; the fall must’ve been twenty feet or more.
Marvin hurried after him, down the steps and into the wilderness. Having just been stuck in the air, Rhyme knew how large the forest was, and how many places there would be for Fiske to hide. If he hadn’t broken his leg, that is … More importantly, the second car had reached the platform, and the operator was helping Conrad out. He looked a little worse for the wear, but otherwise unharmed. Junior draped another blanket around his shoulders. “Rhyme!” Conrad exclaimed, and the two of them ran into each other’s arms. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” he said. “That was a really close call.” Before she could reply, the noise of the crowd seemed to explode, and suddenly everyone was crowding around them.
When she looked up, Silas Manderley and Ms. Sharpe were standing at their sides, along with Matilda and Meg.
“It’s a family reunion,” Silas said, as the crowd moved them toward a row of waiting police cars.
Two hours later, it was nearly midnight at the Attaway Police Station, and Rhyme and Matilda couldn’t hear what was being said on the other side of the glass. They’d been at the station for two hours now, when Rhyme and Matilda were separated from the twins and Silas Manderley. Since then, Manderley had been shut in Sheriff Gibson’s office, presumably explaining what had transpired that night. Both girls slumped back down onto the wooden bench. Rhyme was extraordinarily tired, and before she had time to ask the policewoman across from her for a cup of coffee, she was fast asleep.
Her dreams were strange and scattered. It was a few months ago, all over again, at State. Instead of dancing, she and the Chicken Girls were doing acrobatics, dangling from tightropes and waltzing across gym mats. Ellie was there, and Kayla and Birdie, and Quinn and Rooney. They were all wearing leotards, like the ones they’d worn as little girls. As the music picked up, they started to twist and turn in a bizarre routine. All the while, Rhyme felt an icy chill behind her, as if Fiske was still out there, at large. When the girls parted, she saw him coming toward her. T. K. Rhyme, wake up, he said. It’s time to go home, Rhyme. C’mon, sweetie … The room was spinning like a Ferris wheel, until she opened her eyes and saw both of her parents, squatting in front of the bench, and Harmony hanging behind.
“Nothing to apologize for,” her father said softly.
“That sweet girl Matilda explained everything to us,” her mother said, brushing away a strand of Rhyme’s hair. Sweet girl? Rhyme wondered if she was still dreaming.
“But Meg and Conrad and—”
“They’re fine, Rhyme,” Matilda said, holding her car keys. “I’m going home, too. We’re invited to Mr. Manderley’s house tomorrow for lunch. I’ll pick you up at noon?” Rhyme nodded sleepily, wondering if she was still dreaming. Her father scooped her up like she was still a six-year-old, and her mother said, “Hush, Harmony,” and sometime later she was back home, in her bed, and then it was morning.
CHAPTER 32
Through the window, Rhyme saw her dad unloading suitcases from the car. Just the sight of him, wearing the same green T-shirt he always wore on his days off, back home and in the driveway, made her choke up inexplicably. She hadn’t even realized how much she had missed them.
“Heya, kiddo!” he said brightly as Rhyme ran downstairs and buried herself in his hug. She immediately began weeping. Her dad seemed surprised by her cries, muffled in the soft cotton of his shirt, but he settled into it, patting her back and trying to calm her. “You’re all right now,” he said. “But that was a real roller coaster ride!”
“You mean Ferris wheel,” Rhyme said, pulling back with a smile, sniffling. “I’m just glad you’re back. I really missed you guys.” Her father looked touched, and he pulled her in for another hug before her mother came out side.
“There you are!” She came over and smothered Rhyme in an embrace. “I was so worried. All this business about these runaway twins and some horrible man. Apparently he’s still on the run!” She looked at Rhyme’s tear-streaked face and exchanged a worried look with her husband, who shook his head as if to say “It’s fine.” She cupped Rhyme’s head in both hands and brushed dry her daughter’s teary cheeks. It was remarkable how much could be fixed with a mother’s touch.
“What is this?” Harmony said as she came out of the door, holding Meg’s wide-brimmed hat. “Can I wear it? Look how fabulous I am!” She put it on and sauntered toward Rhyme. Same old Harmony, Rhyme thought with a grin, making up a fast excuse about buying the hat at a yard sale. She took it back when she gave Harmony a hug, telling her she wanted to hear all about Hollywood before running inside to remove any remaining items that might give Meg and Conrad away.
A couple loose socks, a white T-shirt that must be Conrad’s—it smelled like him, pine needles and laundry detergent. Embroidered on the tag was Conrad’s name, no doubt a relic from life with Betty. She breathed a sigh of relief that no one had noticed the items, at least not enough to pick them up and see the name.
When she came back downstairs, Rhyme was beaming. This was how it was supposed to be, she and her family, at home, together. She felt safe here in a way she never did when they were gone, especially once Fiske showed up. And now that they were back, everything would be right again. Movie nights. Stargazing. Maybe there was even still time to greet the fireflies (with an apology, of course, for their tardiness). “Can you make mac and cheese tonight, Mom?” Rhyme asked as she turned the corner into the kitchen.
Her mother nodded. “Of course, dear. But you better go upstairs and get ready. That sweet girl Matilda will be here soon!” The clock showed eleven—how had she slept so late? She really was becoming a teenager…. Upstairs, Rhyme paid particular attention to what she wore, deciding on a loose linen jumpsuit that made her feel a little glamorous. It had pockets, so she knew what to do with her hands, and every time she had worn it, she’d been complimented. In the mirror she saw a high schooler.
Matilda picked her up at twelve on the dot, and they drove in near silence up the long drive to Manderley Estate. They drove for a couple of hours—past Attaway limits, past Millwood. Rhyme had only a vague idea of where they were. Out here, there were few houses, just trees and dandelions and the narrow road. Maybe it was a bad place to live, or maybe Silas Manderley owned everything the eye could see. Still feeling a little drowsy, Rhyme rested her head against the cool window and let the sunlight dance under her eyelids. She must’ve drifted off again, because the next thing she heard was Matilda saying, “Wake up and sm
ell the roses.” Rubbing her eyes, Rhyme followed Matilda to the door.
“Oh, hello!” a woman said, opening the front door before Rhyme and Matilda had even knocked. From the outside, the house was impressive—dark-stained wood shingles, steep roofs of burnished copper, and a sweeping porch that wrapped all the way around the house. Gorgeous, but not ostentatious. It was unclear how large the house was, the back extending into the forest. But as they entered the main hall, the answer became clear: unfathomably enormous.
“Hello, girls,” Silas Manderley said, as he’d seemingly been standing there waiting for them. “Young women, I should say.” This was the first time either Rhyme or Matilda had been this close to him, and they were speechless for a second as they took it all in. Up close, he seemed the largest person in the room, calm but powerful, like an ocean. As he drew closer to extend a hand, Rhyme saw the eyes she would have recognized anywhere. They had the same piercing quality and brilliant color.
“I’m Silas. Or,” he added, a wry smile that reminded Rhyme of Conrad spreading across his face, “Vincent Patterson, as I’ve heard you’re more familiar with.” Matilda and Rhyme looked at each other in disbelief. “Come with me,” he said.
They followed him into a grand dining room with a vaulted ceiling, where Meg and Conrad sat, both in borrowed clothes that were clearly twelve times more expensive than anything they’d ever worn before. “Sorry we didn’t wait,” Conrad said, rolling up a fruit-filled crepe and stuffing it into his mouth. He’d been cleaned up at the police station, but he still had a swollen, black eye from Fiske. Still handsome, thought Rhyme. I wonder if T. K. would still be handsome with a black eye? Conrad started to say something else, but Rhyme couldn’t decipher it with his mouth so full.
Meg was more reserved, and Rhyme noticed she kept looking around as if waiting for the walls to come down and cameras to come out. “Hey,” was all she said.
“I’m sure you all want to hear the full story,” Silas said, pulling up between Conrad and Meg. And everyone nodded. “Betty and I met at the library, if you can believe it. Millwood’s own was little more than a few encyclopedias and tattered hardcovers Attaway’s library had recycled out, so I went there in search of The Stranger—I was an H. P. Lovecraft fanatic, and she loved Tolkien, as I’m sure you know. Anyway, we began debating the merits of C. S. Lewis, whom I’ve always loved, and one thing led to another and …” He let out an involuntary sigh. “You read the letters,” he finally settled on.
“Anyway, this was 1964, as you know, and times were different then.” He cocked his head to the side. “Well, not all that different, unfortunately, but certainly worse, and especially for me and Betty’s relationship.”
“So you really were Vincent Patterson?” Matilda interjected. Of everyone, she seemed the most clearheaded and able to ask the appropriate follow-up questions.
“Yes, ‘Vinny,’ as she called me. She was the only one I allowed to call me that. She insisted, actually. When Betty’s parents found out about us, they tried to rip us apart. Threatened her, threatened me, told me they’d report me and send me straight to jail. But it wasn’t any use. You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”
“James Baldwin,” Meg said. She had been reading him since they found Vincent’s senior quote, just in case it offered a further clue.
“Yes, one of my favorites,” Silas said. “I introduced her to Baldwin’s work. She used that very quote, in fact, to convince me to continue seeing her despite the potential problems. And then she became pregnant. Our senior year. We tried to hide it, made a plan to run away, actually. Something you would appreciate,” he said, nodding to the twins.
They grinned sheepishly.
“But her parents caught on before we could leave, and sent her away to the Crown Lake Sanitorium for Delinquent Girls. They made sure I was banned from the premises, my letters to her and her letters to me thrown away.”
Silas sighed and rubbed the back of his neck like Conrad did when he was embarrassed. But Silas seemed more ashamed, exhaling deeply before admitting, “Her parents came to me, the police outside my door. They said that if I didn’t leave Betty alone, they’d make it their mission to make sure I never left the jail cell they were only too eager to throw me in. ‘We don’t hate you, Vincent,’ they said. ‘We just want what’s best for our Betty. What kind of life could she have with you? What kind of life would that baby have?’” The table fell silent. No one spoke for several moments.
“Now, I was just an eighteen-year-old kid then, you have to remember, with barely any self-esteem. Betty was better than I could ever hope to get. And I did only want the best for her. So I believed her parents and took their $10,000. And then I signed up for the army. I had lost the love of my life, so who cared what happened to me? I had nothing to live for. When Betty returned with our—” Silas choked up and corrected himself. “With the baby, I had already been deployed. I don’t blame her for never forgiving me, especially since my letters never made their way to her. Not until a few years ago, that is.”
“But I’m getting ahead of myself,” he said. “I fought with the 143rd Division for several years, advancing to lieutenant colonel before the Easter attack.” He took a deep breath, clearly reliving several memories he didn’t want to share. “All that got me through those long, horrid nights was a friendship I’d developed. With a nice young man from New York City, the heir to a railroad fortune—or so he thought. Not long before he died, a letter came, saying his father had made a series of crooked investments and the family was ruined. He and I started plotting immediately. We thought there was an opportunity to buy up local newspapers, consolidate them. His family had owned a paper in Brooklyn. We sketched together a business plan.” Manderley took a deep breath and looked out the window to his vast backyard.
“Soon after,” he continued, “we took a few days of heavy artillery. I got a bullet in the left leg. And then a bomb sent me fifteen yards from camp and into darkness. Half my company was wiped off the face of the earth—Silas Manderley included. I was as good as dead. And as far as the army knew, I was dead. DIA, they classified me,” he said, which rang a bell with Rhyme.
“What’s DIA?” she said, remembering the acronym next to Vincent Patterson’s name at the retrospective.
“Death in absentia. It means they didn’t find my body and I never surfaced, so they assumed I was dead. But this all happened without my knowledge. I was asleep, unconscious, then in and out of consciousness for what I was told was seven weeks. When I finally woke I was lost and confused. I spoke no Vietnamese. Six months later, I was back in the United States, using Silas Manderly’s ID tags. In a safe deposit box, I had only one possession of any worth: the cash Betty’s parents had given me. I had never touched it. I just let it sit in a bank in Millwood for all those years. So I was determined to become a man her parents would approve of, someone whose letters they would convey, someone whose life they deemed worthy of their daughter’s.”
“But how did you become Silas Manderley?” Conrad, now on his third Belgian waffle, interjected. “That’s what I can’t understand.”
“Though I was a black man in America, my skin was always light,” Silas explained. “I could pass. So to start my new business, I needed a name people could get behind. No one questions your money if you have a name like Silas Manderley. So under that name, I bought up my first newspaper, in Poughkeepsie, under the name of H. U. Y. Enterprises.”
“Why H. U. Y.?” This time it was Matilda who interrupted.
“Huy was the name of my doctor overseas, a Vietnamese man. He said his name meant ‘successful.’ So, why not? But by the time I bought up my seventh paper, everyone was calling the company by my name … or should I say by Silas’s. And that name stuck. I transformed the company into Manderley Holdings, and soon after we got into book publishing, radio, and eventually television.”
“So that st
ock certificate we found in Betty’s room?” asked Meg. “That Uncle Fiske now has?”
“It was something I sent to Betty, that I suppose her parents decided not to throw out. I’m told the authorities still haven’t found your uncle, but I suspect they will. So for a few more days, he can fancy himself a millionaire.”
“When did you come back home?” Rhyme said, wanting Silas to finish the story.
“I bought this house in 1987, a few years after Manderley Holdings began operations in New York. And the first thing I did was find her again. My Betty.”
He cleared his throat. “I stopped by her house once, ringing the doorbell, holding a bouquet of flowers. But her husband answered the door. She had a husband. And behind him, two children. Our child and her child,” Silas said, looking toward the twins. “Your mother. She was fifteen then, with a brother who had nothing to do with Vincent Patterson. They both called that man ‘Dad.’ So I made up an excuse about being a flower delivery man who had the wrong address. I left. It felt like the right decision at the time. To let her go. She moved to Asheville a couple years later.”
“I had reached out to Betty finally,” Silas said, “only five years ago. I had heard her husband, Al, passed—I had kept up with her over the years, not that she knew, of course—and reintroduced myself. It was only then we realized the full extent of what her parents had done. But she told me she had kept my letters after all those years, the ones that got to her before her parents got
to us.”
“But neither of us wanted to live in the past, though we remembered it fondly. Neither of us regret—regretted—our lives, and we maintained a lovely correspondence these last five years. So what do you think?” It took a second to realize Silas was asking a question, and Meg and Conrad looked at each other, neither knowing what that meant. “Living with me, now that your uncle, I mean—
“Of course, you don’t have to,” Silas said. “But if you would want to stay with me now that your grandmother is gone … It gets mighty lonely in this big place all alone …” No one dared breathe. “Her estate, of course, is yours. That is, once we find Fiske. But now that your uncle has shown his true colors it won’t be hard to dissolve any paperwork he filed during Betty’s final days. The house, and everything in it, will be yours in due time. Until then …” Silas trailed off, shifting in his seat. “I thought if you wanted to live here, I mean …”