by Nancy Bush
I knocked on the back door, the one they used like a front door. The other door off the kitchen area was dark, but I could see a light from the upstairs landing.
James came to admit me. Unlocking the door, he mumbled a hello, and then we were standing in the entry hall together. He’d always looked used up and far older than his years, but in the uncertain light from the landing, he seemed almost withered, ancient, as if he’d been reanimated from some long ago time.
That smell of decay I’d first noticed when I’d arrived at the property came to me again: musty, dank, with a thread of something noxious and sour. I suspected it was more my imagination than reality. With no Reyna, Carlotta, and Orchid, the heart of the house was gone and we were left with the dying remains.
Maybe Violet was right. This place had a psyche all right.
I sought for normalcy. “All right,” I said conversationally. “I’m here now. Who did you see go into Orchid’s rooms?” My voice seemed to reverberate against the walls.
“I called you because I needed to talk to you.” He turned and headed for the stairs.
“So talk.” I didn’t move. The atmosphere of the place was getting to me. I figured Violet was due any second, and my cell phone was back in my pocket. I’d left my purse in the car. There was no reason to play Nancy Drew with these weirdos.
James hesitated when he realized I wasn’t following, one foot on the bottom step. He cocked his head, but he didn’t turn around. “You’ve been listening to Violet.”
My view was the back of his graying head. His voice was almost disembodied as he was facing the window at the upstairs landing. I took a couple of steps closer to him. “That’s right.”
“She was only a kid when she left. She didn’t know us.”
“She told me about the playhouse,” I said.
He seemed to clutch at the stairway rail, but it was hard to tell. “The playhouse was Lily’s.”
Was that what this was, then? A confession? Was that why he’d called me? I began to doubt he’d ever seen anyone stealing into Orchid’s rooms. I moved a little closer to him and said, “I’ve seen your paintings.”
“When?”
“I let myself into your rooms the day after Orchid disappeared.”
“You searched them?”
“I just looked inside.”
He headed upstairs without another word. This time, I followed. At the top of the gallery I glanced down into the entry hall, listening hard for an approaching engine. Where was Violet?
James was unlocking his door. I gingerly stepped in his direction. I would rather drink the algae-furred waters of Lake Chinook than follow him inside a room with those paintings.
“I’m working on another one,” he said. “I think it might be my last.” He gazed back at me. “Violet said she told you we had sex with Lily.”
I was surprised he approached the subject so boldly, but he seemed weary of everything.
“You have to understand,” he said. “It’s not what you think. It wasn’t like that.”
“Okay.”
“Lily would go to the playhouse to hide from my father,” James said. “Garrett and I would try to sneak up on her. She got mad and hit Garrett, and he hit her back. Then they were on the floor and she was screaming and pulling out his hair. And then…”
I waited, frozen and mesmerized.
“And then she was rubbing on him and he said, ‘You want it. You want it. You want it,’ and she said yes, and she was laughing.” He shook his head, as if to eradicate the vision. “And Garrett was on her and she was letting him. But she was watching me the whole time. I tried to run, but they wouldn’t let me. She started kissing me. She was like that. But it only happened once. Just once. I wouldn’t go back even though she taunted me. Garrett did, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.” His eyes were deep hollows. “But Violet thinks it was more than once. She called me a liar.”
“You talked to Violet about this?” So, she had brought it up to him.
“She said I was Jazz’s father.” He shook his head slowly from side-to-side. “It was only one time!”
I could have pointed out that one time is all it takes, but that wasn’t really the issue. “A DNA test would answer that question.”
“No…”
“Is this really why you called me?” I asked.
He didn’t answer for a moment, too lost in his own guilty hell. Then he said, “No…no…I want the truth out, that’s all.” He drew a shaking breath. “She’s in my mother’s suite already.”
“She?”
He closed the door to his room in my face. I turned to look toward the north end of the hall. Orchid’s doors were closed, but they’d never truly shut tightly and now I saw a slim column of light shining through the gap between them.
My instinct was to race-walk out of the house, but then fleeing is always my first reaction. Nerves of steel I do not possess. However, curiosity and a certain amount of misplaced pride in my ability as an information specialist drove my legs forward. At Orchid’s doors I hesitated. Should I knock, or just barge in?
Who the hell was “she”?
With one hand inside my pocket, wrapped around my cell phone, I pushed open the door with my other.
Chapter Nineteen
At first I thought there was no one inside. Like downstairs, the room was illuminated only by one light, a table lamp whose wattage was in the forties or less. But then I saw a figure standing by the window and my heart leapt to my throat.
She turned around, her bulk giving her away before I actually recognized her. “Dahlia,” I said, surprised.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
I remembered then that she’d been here that first day, when I’d originally noticed the two sports cars. They were hers and James’s. She didn’t seem the type somehow, but what did I know about her?
“I’m…waiting for Violet,” I said.
“Well, she’s not staying in my mother’s rooms.”
My gaze wandered toward the mantel and the hearth. I had an image of Orchid’s crumpled form flash briefly across my mind.
“James called you, didn’t he?” she said, a note of betrayal in her voice. “He told you he saw me come in here that afternoon.”
I didn’t see any reason to lie. “Yes.”
“He’s such an idiot.”
“So, he was wrong?”
“I did not kill my mother.” Her mouth clamped shut but I could see her chin tremble with emotion. “I hate him for saying that.”
“I think he’s under a certain amount of pressure,” I said lightly, checking my watch. Violet was long delayed. I wondered if I should call Dwayne and give him an update.
“You have somewhere to go?” she asked. “You barge in here, and now you have to just leave?”
“I could stay,” I said, not sure where this was going. “I was just wondering where Violet was.”
“Violet,” she sneered. Then she closed her eyes and shuddered. “You think I killed her? You think it was intentional? I could tell by the way you sneaked in here, you thought you were going to find out all the secrets. You were the one who talked her out of signing the power of attorney. She was going to do it, and then you had to open your big mouth.”
“But she signed it anyway,” I pointed out.
Dahlia’s mouth worked. “I’m the signer for the family. I’ve done it for years. I can sign Mother’s name better than she can.”
“Are you saying you faked the POA?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying, smart ass. And if it hadn’t have been for you, I wouldn’t have had to. Then all of a sudden Mom’s missing, and she hasn’t signed the goddamn form! So, I took care of it.” She went back to staring out the window. “But then she came back, and she remembered she hadn’t signed. All those things she forgot…all those things…” She shook her head at the irony of it. “But she remembered that. So, we got in an argument. But I—did—not—kill—her.”
“What happened
?” I asked.
“She was going to tell everybody about the POA. And she was really mad at me. She actually swung at me! Her whole life she was a doormat. Like Satin. Just let Daddy do whatever he wanted.” She pointed to her chest. “I was Daddy’s flower. It was me, not Lily. We had something special, and my mother was jealous. All of a sudden it comes out how she blames me for everything, when it was Lily’s fault! And then she just swung at me. What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do?”
“Push her away from you?” I guessed.
“That’s right. I didn’t push her very hard. But she just lost her balance and her head hit the mantel. I ran downstairs to the meeting.” Dahlia clasped her hands together and brought them to her lips.
“What happened between you and Lily at River Shores, Haven of Rest?”
“What?” Her mind wasn’t on that.
“When they had to restrain her…you’d seen her that day and she was upset.”
“She was pregnant,” Dahlia said. “Could be Garrett’s, could be James’s, could be anybody’s.”
“Your father’s?”
That brought fury to her face. “No! Daddy wasn’t like that. Aren’t you listening? Lily was a liar, too. My baby died. Lily was going to keep hers. She was like that. Selfish. Mean.” She stepped toward me and I backed up, but she was lost in the power of her own narration. “I lost my baby, and Lily kept hers. And there’s Jasper, big as life. A big dumb idiot. And Logan…” Her voice lowered with loathing.
I wanted to keep her on track, but it was difficult. “You found out about her keeping the baby when you went to see her.”
“Lily was six months pregnant and sleeping with every cock that crossed her path. It was pathological. It was killing Daddy. He thought putting her there would save her, but nothing was going to change her. I told her she’d ruined her baby already, that it was damaged. I knew even then. She went into a screaming rage and they had to restrain her.”
“Jazz isn’t damaged.”
“Yes, he is.”
“He’s lost his short-term memory, but that was from the car accident. And Lily was nine months pregnant,” I pointed out, wondering why I was even arguing with her. She’d definitely had some kind of break with reality.
“Six months,” Dahlia insisted. “They held her down, cut off her air supply by mistake. Killed her brain. She went into a coma. They kept her on a ventilator until the baby was born, but she died that day. He’s damaged, and my mother spent the rest of her life trying to make up for it.”
“They kept her alive for three months, so that the child could be born?”
“That’s right. Nobody wanted to. Daddy sure didn’t, but there was nothing to do.”
I absorbed this, thinking about Lily, and the staff at the hospital, and the secrets of the Purcells. Pulling the plug, so to speak, would have killed the baby. They waited till after Jazz was born.
Downstairs I heard the back entry door open. Violet called, “You hoo! Jane? Are you here?”
“In Orchid’s rooms.”
Violet’s footsteps tip-tapped up the stairs, along the hallway, then she entered the room. She looked from me to Dahlia and back again. “Did I miss something?”
Dahlia looked at her, said, “Lily,” with serious loathing, then collapsed on the couch, crying noisily into her hands.
Three days later I found myself on a road trip to the Purcells’ house in central Oregon, near Black Butte. Jazz, Logan, The Binkster and I were in my Volvo as Jazz’s convertible BMW wasn’t going to fill the bill. Dwayne and Violet were meeting us.
I’d done my jolly best to be dis-included. The Purcell secrets were aired. Everything was over. All that was left was to lay the ground rules out to Jazz concerning our non-relationship.
But Logan would have none of it and in a weak moment I’d ended up saying yes. Logan seemed to consider me his new best friend. He’d gotten the major head wrap off, and though he was a little self-conscious about the shaved section of his head and the stitches, it didn’t seem to bother him pain-wise. I hadn’t completely been won over by him, but I was beginning to think he was almost okay.
It was Jazz who was having trouble with head pain. Initially I thought it was just your usual garden variety headache until he admitted that he suffered from migraine-type pain, another by-product of the accident. Dahlia’s “damaged” comments ran around my brain like the silver ball in a pinball machine, bouncing off one thing, hitting another, jumping back the other way. Not that Jazz’s problems had anything to do with the circumstances of his birth—that I did not believe. Dahlia just had some desperate need to blame Lily for everything—dear old Dad being entirely blameless in the series of events that had caused the downward spiral for the whole family. No, Jazz’s problems were more recent and I had a gut feeling they were far worse than he maintained. It also made it difficult for me to pass on to him the gist of Dahlia’s big revelation. What purpose would it serve? Unfortunately, now I was the one with the secret, but since it was all half-baked assumptions, I couldn’t figure out how to present the information or if I even should.
So, instead, I focused on the positive, or at least tried to. There was a part of me that congratulated myself on a job well done. This is the deluded part of myself that wanted to cheer the fact that all Purcell secrets were out in the open and that I, Jane Kelly, had been responsible for that fact. The other part of me, the reality-based part, had the audacity to ask what I’d really accomplished. Orchid was gone. Nobody had benefited from the information I’d uncovered in any positive way. James had squirreled himself away in his room to paint his last painting. Dahlia acted like we’d never had the conversation that, in some ways, had begged more questions than answered about who’d been with whom and whose child was whose. All I really knew was, there’d been a whole lotta lovin’ going on, none of it what you’d call a healthy relationship.
Even Violet, who’d developed late and escaped most of the sexual abuse, hadn’t been able to settle into her own life and put her energy into anything lasting. Four marriages and four divorces later, she wasn’t the picture of romantic stability.
Not that it seemed to bother Dwayne.
When Violet walked in on the tail end of my conversation with Dahlia, Dwayne walked into the entry hall. He’d grown tired of waiting for my call. Violet, as it turns out, had stopped at a small diner on Macadam, worried that she may have consumed too many of her signature drinks to be within the legal blood alcohol level. She’d ordered french fries and coffee, consumed them, then resumed her drive home.
Dwayne didn’t know she’d been delayed. He’d actually entered the Purcell mansion, gun drawn. I learned this later as it would have freaked me out a little. By the time he reached the north suite, he’d tucked the gun in the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. I saw the weapon when we all turned to leave. It reminded me that I’d stepped into a job that required some means of self-protection. Dwayne had suggested more than once that I needed to get over my aversion to guns and get a license. He may be right. It just worries me that if I try to tuck my weapon down my own waistband at the small of my back, I could shoot my ass off. Yeah, yeah I know that’s what safeties are for. It still sounds too possible to ignore.
As soon as I have my reckoning with Jazz, I’m going to rethink some of these things. The cool mace cans still sound pretty good. Or pepper spray. Or a stun gun.
We arrived at the lane that led to the ranch house around six PM. Like their residence in Dunthorpe, this one was down a long drive. Unlike the Dunthorpe home, however, this drive was a two-wheel track dug into the red central Oregon dust that led through skinny aspens and Ponderosa pines. No Douglas firs on this side of the Cascade Mountains. Not enough water. Yes, it rains in Oregon a lot, but that’s mostly throughout the Willamette Valley. Those same rain clouds get hung up in the Cascade Mountains and never make it any further. It leaves central and eastern Oregon dry and cold in the winter, dry and hot in the summer.
&nbs
p; The home itself was a huge lodge out of peeled logs. It had a wraparound porch and wide steps leading to massive front doors with wooden handles made from ax handles. Walking inside was like entering a theme park. I expected Paul Bunyan and Babe to be waiting in the dining room, but the room’s space was filled with a huge table constructed out of several enormous tree rounds bolted together in three rings with some kind of inch-thick plastic material covering it. Twenty-some chairs were parked around the circles of the table.
I’d worried that Jazz expected me to share a room with him, but when I grabbed an empty one, proclaiming it for mine, he didn’t try to bring his bags inside. Having Logan with us was probably the reason. Difficult to have wild, uninhibited sex with your child in the next room. I wasn’t into the kind of yee-haw romping fun the house seemed to cry for anyway.
It did give me pause about Dwayne and Violet, however. I could picture the two of them whoopee-ki-ying all over the place.
As soon as I’d unpacked—which consisted of taking out my toothbrush and brushing my teeth—I moseyed downstairs to set a spell on the back porch. There was, by golly, a porch swing out of more barkless branches. I sat down and let the sun dapple my skin as it threaded its way through the pines that surrounded the entire property. A small deck jutted out from the back of the porch, which held a hot tub on a platform. You could sit in its depths under the hot sun or night stars.
I tried to get into thoughts of relaxation, but honestly I would have preferred to be back in Lake Chinook, working on another job.
Binkster had learned that Logan was a complete pushover for food. All she had to do was press her chin against his leg, if he was standing, or his arm, if he was sitting, and Logan would head for the chow. I’d given him a stern talking to, and Logan had taken to keeping bits of low-cal kiblets in his pockets. Now and again he would give her one which she would wolf down with the speed of light. It wasn’t much food and it kept them both happy. They were currently up in Logan’s room where he’d hooked up his video system in record time, and they were deep into Fissure.