by Lynda Trent
“Oh!” she wailed, sensing victory. “How can you be so heartless! I… I thought you would be glad! I thought you loved me!”
“Now, wait a minute,” Ryan objected. “We never once talked about love and you know it!”
“But I thought you did!” She wheeled away from him and ran across the clearing. At the edge of the bushes, she stopped. “You’d better marry me, Ryan Hastings, or I’ll… I’ll tell everybody you raped me!”
“Dore!” He stared at her, dumbfounded.
“I will!” she screamed. “And they’ll all believe me, too!”
“Damn it, you know it was never like that at all! I want you to calm down. Give me time to figure out how to help you!”
“Time! I haven’t got time! Soon everyone will know!” She turned and dove into the inky bushes.
He listened as her footsteps died away on the path to her house. “A baby!” He said the word as if it were as foreign to him as was the thought. Dore had assured him that she was on the pill and he had naturally assumed that there was no threat of pregnancy. Slowly, he picked his way through the bushes and back toward the street. The twigs caught at his clothing like so many witches’ fingers, and a drift of Spanish moss settled across his face like a cobweb. He yanked savagely at the moss and ground it underfoot. How could he have fathered a baby when he was on an offshore rig at the time?
“That baby could belong to anyone” he commented to the night. With Dore’s track record, he seriously doubted if she herself knew who the father was… if she was indeed pregnant. With her penchant for lies, he wasn’t even convinced of that. Still, if it was true, he pitied her situation.
Ryan was deep in thought all the way home. He let himself into the courtyard he shared with several other tenants and with the overflow of the Blue Crystal Lounge. The club was quiet for a change, but still he could hear the muted notes of a trumpet playing the blues.
Gas lamps threw a muted yellow light on the flagstone patio, and the droplets of water in the fountain glistened like diamonds. Ryan walked across and climbed the outside stairs to his apartment above.
He unlocked the door and automatically flipped on the Hot switch as he went to the bar and made himself a drink.
Sinking down onto his couch, he leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. Dully, he wondered if the real father of Dore’s baby had turned her down, and how many of her other lovers she had confronted before tonight. Maybe he was, indeed, the father. If she was wrong about it being June, then it wasn’t impossible.
He tried to envision Dore in the role of motherhood, but the prospect was simply too unlikely. She flitted through life on a cloud of irresponsibility that had been intoxicating in a lover, but would create mayhem in the life of a child. She could spend hours deciding what drew to wear to a party, then at the last minute decide not to go at all. When he’d first met Dore, this mercurial quality, coupled with her eager sensuality and dark beauty, had been irresistible. But Ryan knew she’d never be able to adjust to the demands of raising a child. He doubted she would even try. No, the baby would soon become the responsibility of her aging fathera man who had not been young when Dore herself was born. Ryan let out a long sigh. She couldn’t possibly keep the child; it would be too wrong to the innocent baby.
A loud knock on his door startled him. “Dore?” he said as he opened it and she stormed into the room.
“Of course it’s me! Who else were you expecting? I drove over to give you one more chance. Are you going to marry me, or do I have to tell daddy you raped me?”
“Calm down. Calm down,” he tried to soothe her. “I think I have a solution to this.”
“So do I! Marry me!”
“Dore, you can put the baby up for adoption. There are a lot of couples who desperately want a child who could give it a good home.”
“What? You want me to sell my baby? Our baby!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said angrily. “I’m not talking about selling your baby. I said put it up for adoption.” It infuriated him when someone twisted his words. He tried to calm himself. Dore was always high-strung, and now she looked almost wild.
“I can’t do that! I can’t just give my baby to strangers!”
“Well, you certainly can’t keep it. You don’t have a job, and your father can’t be expected to raise another child at his age. Be reasonable!”
“Reasonable! You’d throw our baby away like a bundle of trash!” Her eyes were glassy and she paced the room frantically.
” Stop staying that! I don’t think you even know who the father is.”
Dore had a trapped look on her face, like a cornered animal, but she didn’t reply.
“Furthermore, why didn’t you tell me you stopped taking the pill? Surely you must have realized that this could happen. And besides, you’ve told me over and over that you never wanted to have children!”
“You don’t have any right to accuse me like that. You don’t own me!”
“If it’s a question of money or your pride, I’ll pay for you to go away until it’s over. You can got an apartment and send the bills to me. Then, afterward, you can come home and nobody will know.”
“You can’t expect me to agree to that!”
“Dore! You can’t keep it!”
“Abortion! You think I would agree to an abortion?” A thin line of foam flecked her contorted lips. “You want me to agree to having some backstreet butcher cut me up?”
“I never suggested such a thing!” Ryan stared. The thought had never crossed his mind.
“Well, that’s what you meant! Abortion!” She spat the word out as if it were dirty. “I can’t have an abortion! I’m Catholic!”
“Will you quiet down before you make yourself sick? I don’t want you to have an abortion.”
“Oh, yes, you do! You don’t care if somebody cuts me to pieces! Damn you, Ryan Hastings, I’ll die before I agree to such a disgusting thing!” She ran to the door and threw it open so that it hit the wall and left an indentation of the knob in the plaster. “You’re not going to get off the hook that easily. Do you hear me? I’ll die first!” She ran through the open door and out into the night.
“Dore! Wait!” Ryan saw her pause and look back at him, then she turned and raced across the courtyard.
“Damn!” he muttered as he chased after her. He couldn’t let her go away so upset.
She was pulling away from the curb when he reached the street. Quickly, he fumbled his car keys from his pocket and headed to the garage.
Within a few blocks, he had pulled alongside her car, and he wondered if she had planned that he would. This was just the sort of melodrama that Dore loved. But he felt she needed help.
With a scowl, he motioned for her to pull over.
She tossed her head angrily and her car shot forward. They passed the city limit signs on Interstate in a blur of speed. Now Ryan was following her in earnest. Dore was a skillful driver ordinarily, but in her present state of hysteria, she was driving like a madwoman.
The lake appeared on his right like a silver mirror in the moonlight. On the other side of the road, black trees loomed into his view, then whipped behind him as he tried to overtake Dore.
Ryan knew the curve was coming up. So did Dore. She had lived in New Orleans all her life, and knew the road as well as she knew her name. And she didn’t slow down.
Her car left the road. For a moment, it seemed to fly through the air in slow motion. Then it crashed into a large cypress tree, twisted to one side and plunged into the lake like a grotesquely crippled bird.
“Dore!”
Ryan ground his car to a screeching stop and threw himself out the door. Ripples were still widening across the lake’s surface and air bubbles were ballooning up out of the dark water.
“Dore!” he cried out again as he kicked off his shoes.
Ryan plunged into the lake and fought his way down. Beneath the surface, the water was pitch-black, and he could see nothing. Lungs aching, he surfaced, gulp
ed at the air and dove under again.
For a moment, he thought he touched the car’s slick surface, but then it shifted and he couldn’t find it again. He was beginning to see bright flashes before his eyes and his head reeled from lack of oxygen.
He broke the surface to gasp for air. Headlights from the nearby highway shone on him, and he cried out for help. Without waiting to see if anyone was coming to his aid, he dove again.
Somewhere he’d heard that submerged cars would hold an air pocket. It was possible that Dore was still able to breathe. At any rate, he couldn’t stop looking for her.
He was vaguely aware of other people in the water with him, and of diving again and again. Then large hands were hauling him toward the store, and even though he fought, they dragged him out of the lake.
“Take it easy, mister,” the policeman said.
“I can’t! She’s in there! Her car went in!” Ryan gulped air into his burning lungs and tried to crawl back into the water.
“I’ve already radioed in for a team of rescue divers. They should be here in a few minutes,” the officer said as he tried to reassure Ryan. The policeman had been patrolling Interstate in the opposite lane as the speeding cars swept by, and was on the scene in minutes. But it was almost half an
hour before another pair of blue and red emergency lights joined the others, pulsating like the heartbeat of horror itself, the cry of the siren beginning to wane.
Ryan saw two men, dressed in wet suits and wearing lights on their heads, jump out of the back of a police van. Pointing at the water, he yelled, “She’s in there! In a car. Hurry!”
As the divers shrugged on their oxygen tanks and slid beneath the oily water, Ryan gave the policeman Dore’s name and address, as well as his own.
When the divers finally surfaced, they were alone.
“It’s no use,” one of them said as he came to Ryan. “We found her, but she’s gone.”
“What? She can’t be! There would have been air pockets. She can’t be gone!” he couldn’t bring himself to say “dead.”
“I’m sorry, sir. She must have died when she hit that tree.” He nodded toward the deep gash on the cypress by the road. “She never knew what hit her. I can tell you she died quickly and didn’t drown.”
“You must have made a mistake!”
“No, sir. There’s no way I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”
Despite the policeman’s insistence that there was nothing else he could do, Ryan stayed until the tow track pulled up the mangled wreckage of the car. After one nauseous glance, he saw why the diver had been so sure that Dore had died on impact.
In a state of shock, Ryan at last went home.
The light was still on and his drink sat on the coffee table, though the ice had long since melted. Slowly, he sank down on the couch and stared at the doorway where Dore had stood seemingly moments before.
When dawn turned the sky to pewter, then rose, Ryan stood up and made his way to the bedroom. Although he wasn’t scheduled to leave for Kilgore until Monday, he knew he had to get away for a while. Away from New Orleans and his apartment and everything that reminded him of Dore.
When he left town, he took a longer route than was necessary. One that didn’t take him within sight of the lake and the scarred cypress tree.
Chapter Three
Clare slipped into her burgundy linen skirt and straightened the collar of her ruffled white silk blouse. Her appointment with the bank president was for one o’clock, and she had no intention of being late or looking as if she needed more time on the loan. Very early in her marriage, she had learned from observing Elliot that it was easier to get money if you looked and acted as though you didn’t need it.
She ran a brush through her thick brown hair and tied it at the nape of her neck with a narrow ribbon. Needing very little makeup, Clare smudged just a hint of smoky gray eye shadow on her lids and touched her black eyelashes with mascara. She carefully applied a rosy lip gloss to her full and sensuous lips, then surveyed herself in the mirror. Her eyes looked too large and dark in her pale face from lack of sleep, but that would have to do. Resolutely, she took her clutch bag from the dresser and hurried out of her room.
Eldon was cutting the lawn, and the aroma of the fresh-mown grass followed her into her Mercedes. This was a scent that she usually found very pleasing, but today she was far too worried to enjoy it. If the meeting didn’t go well, she’d lose her property.
The tree-lined drive wound past the old oil derrick in the front yard and down the hill to the curving street. Although Clare had neighbors, their homes were blocked from view by the dense foliage surrounding the Marshall home. Most of the other houses sat on three acres and were clearly visible from the road. For the most part, they were square, severe-looking structures of World War II vintage, and were made of a hodge-podge of various colored bricks that lacked the clean, classic lines of her own red brick house with its elegant white columns and pristine woodwork. Clare gripped the steering wheel firmly and vowed that no matter what happened, she wouldn’t give up the home she had grown to love. Besides, she had nowhere else to go, she reminded herself. This gave her an even greater determination to succeed. Efficiently, she turned onto the broad street and drove the few blocks into downtown.
The Farmers’ Bank and Trust, Kilgore’s only financial institution, was housed in the largest building in town, and its lines were classic. The designer of the building, in the late twenties or early thirties, had probably drawn his plans with marble in mind, or perhaps granite. However, the contractors, being rather independent in their thinking and probably very close to their pocketbooks, had erected it with native bricks of a dirty yellow hue. At a later date, someone had erected tall granite columns on either side of the glass door, but they only supported a small lintel that was placed too high to either shade the door from the sun or to shelter it from the rain. The columns had always looked quite strange growing out of the narrow sidewalk, and to Clare it seemed as if they had been left there en route to a more likely destination, then forgotten.
The building to the left of the bank was of a wooden-frame construction, with faded paint. Once the home of the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, it had been vacant for several years and seemed to be clutching the ugly but solid bank for moral support. At present, its only purpose in the life of this little town of thirteen thousand was to serve as a billboard, its length painted with a cracked and peeling ad for Coca-Cola. Clare wondered why the city council allowed it to remain. For years, no one had even tried to rent it, and its very structure looked unsafe. On the right side of the bank was the office of Nelson, Clawson and Wade, attorneys at law, which squatted
on its cement steps as if it were too proud to associate with the derelict building, but was humbled by the massive bank. None of the buildings in town showed any sort of bond, architecturally speaking. Across the street was Lenoir’s Fashions, a clothing store that appeared to have been built out of blue tile and concrete blocks. A “help wanted” sign shared the display with Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and a mid-sixties style prom dress.
Clare bit her lower lip. She hadn’t had a job since her marriage. As a teenager, she had done the usual babysitting and had spent a hot and unhappy stint in an unairconditioned dry cleaner’s in nearby Gladewater just before she left for college. While pursuing her education, she’d supplemented her art scholarship by washing cars and walking dogs in her spare time. None of these skills could possibly help her meet the debts she now faced. Even if she was qualified to sell clothing, would she be able to keep the position if she got it? Elliot had destroyed much of her self-esteem through his constant assurances that she was only fit for ornamenting a room. She knew this wasn’t true, but she was terrified of failing. “No,” she said aloud. “I won’t try that yet.”
She stepped out of the cool car and into the broiling heat. The temperature gauge on the drugstore down the street read 101. Clare knew the gauge had always read four degrees low.
Inside the
bank was cool, like a cave. The high, old-fashioned ceilings were ornately carved, and the smell of tobacco smoke and old money that always accompanied such buildings pervaded. The bank’s only concession to modern times were airconditioning and up-to-date office equipment. The tellers still worked behind ornate wire grills, the secretaries’ desks were made of heavy oak and the walls were decorated with a huge fresco of unwieldy oxen and pioneers.
Clare’s heels clicked loudly on the polished maroon and white mosaic floor. The bank was one of the few places she had ever seen that made her feel inadequate and childish.
She approached a teller’s window and said, more loudly that she had expected, “I have an appointment with Mr. Thorndyke. Is he in?”
The teller, a gray-haired woman who somewhat resembled a chicken, looked up and over the rims of her glasses. “Certainly. His office is through that door over there.”
Clare felt the woman’s eyes follow her, but she refused to
look back. Bracing her shoulders, she knocked firmly on the door that bore the brass plate reading ”Neal R. Thorodyke, President.”
“Come in,” a brusque voice instructed.
Feeling childishly afraid, Clare entered the banker’s office.
Her footsteps were cushioned by a plush beige carpet. Sunlight filtered through transparently white sheer curtains between drapes of a dark gold fabric. The desk was huge and Danish modern, with a slab of smooth black slate for its top. Behind it sat Neal Thorndyke.
He rose on seeing the beautiful young woman. “Hello, Mrs. Marshall. So sorry about your husband. Such a pity. Have a seat, will you?”
Clare sat on one of the brown leather chairs opposite the desk. “Thank you.”
Thorndyke was a large man on the far side of forty, but he still retained an echo of the physique that put him through school on a football scholarship. Even though he maintained a rigorous jogging schedule, his fondness for beer was apparent around his waistline.
“I’ve come to discuss the mortgage my husband took out on my land. You see, there must have been some sort of mistake,” Clare said with more composure than she felt. “The property is mine, and I never agreed to use it as collateral.”